<a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10600242-how-to-be-a-woman&#8221; style=”float: left; padding-right: 20px”><img alt=”How To Be a Woman” border=”0″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515E%2Bic7qOL._SX106_.jpg&#8221; /></a><a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10600242-how-to-be-a-woman”>How To Be a Woman</a> by <a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/939363.Caitlin_Moran”>Caitlin Moran</a><br/>
My rating: <a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/182035067″>4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Every woman I’ve spoken to recently knows about this and is either reading it or has put it on their list.  Caitlin Moran (who makes a point of mis-pronouncing her own first name) runs through a whole list of topics, the sort of things that most women discuss amongst themselves.  She begins as an overweight teenager and works through various rites of passage: pubic hair, and what to do with it, menstruation, masturbation, sex, love, marriage, childbirth and abortion.  On the way she also engages with pornography and striptease, the differences between men and women and our attitude to ‘celebs’.  Her style is lively, intimate and chatty (although the screaming upper case letters do tend to annoy) and she makes many interesting points without writing a polemical novel.  In fact this is not really a novel, more a mixture of memoir and observational comedy.  She would make a very good stand up commedienne (perhaps that should be comedian if I’m writing from a feminist point of view) or after dinner speaker.  I was almost rofling (her style is catching) at her description of waxed female porn stars: ‘it’s all hairless down there: close-ups are like watching one of the Mitchell brothers, with no eyes, eating a very large, fidgety sausage.'<br/><br/>This is a book that every woman, from eight to eighty, should read.  It should also remind you that you don’t need to hate men to be a feminist; you just need to believe in the female sex and that we should have exactly the same opportunities as men.
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