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Hello and welcome to political thinking.

Now it may not have escape your notice that we are now in a general election campaign.

Just before that really gets fully underway though,

we've got a fascinating interview for you

with someone who shapes our thinking not about who to vote for but about

the status of men and of women. The writer, the author Catlinlin Moran, wants us to think again about the role of young men, the role of boys.

She's finally ignored her old advice to shrug off the question what advice do you have for men by writing a book all about men.

She's done so much as a feminist icon to encourage a bigger, better, more constructive conversation about women,

I think you'll find this conversation is equally fascinating.

This episode I should tell you does include some strong language

Cali Moran welcome to political thinking.

Thank you so much. You're so lovely to be here.

Why is the obvious first question? After all these years writing about women, why write about men?

Well the flip self-deprecating answer would be I've written about everything to do with being a woman

and I kind of thought my menopause would have started a couple of years ago and I could get another book out of that but I've been persistently

pereminopause with the help of HRT so I had no female experiences to write about for mid-life and I was like well let's look at the other 50% of the audience

yeah just got to fill the space right literally yeah let's just go and sell to those other guys but the real

reason was that my my daughters became teenage and then in their early 20s and what I was

hearing from their generation of young boys

was that you know then these are liberal North London boys who I think we all presumed

would just be feminists and suddenly they were saying things like feminism has gone too far

...