With much regret, I don’t read as many books for pleasure. I read a lot for work and then spend way more hours that I care to admit on various social media and news sites. Hours that really could be better spent engaging in one of my favourite pastimes – reading a good novel, autobiography or travel book.

That said, earlier today I started reading: How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. It’s her coming of age autobiography written from a modern feminist point of view. It’s funny as heck as well as thought provoking.

In chapter one, she recounts getting her period for the first time (traumatic!), becoming obsessed with masturbation (dreamlike!) and oh yeah, searching for the best sources of filth/porn – all of this in the late 80/early 90s – long before the internet make it just a click of a button away!

In this very first chapter she also makes the argument for a 100 per cent increase in the type of porn available to us. Particularly as “the vast majority of the porn out there is identikit and mechanical as fridge-freezers rolling off a production line.” Thus we need more “free range porn.” This kind of porn is apparently more “warm, humane, funny, dangerous, psychedelic with wholly different parameters to male porn.”

Now considering that I’m uptight and like to use my own imagination, I don’t visit porn sites and I’m not interested in watching porn period. From what little I’ve seen, Moran is right when she goes on to say that most pornography today is: “bizarre, mechanised, factory-farmed fucking: bloodless, naked aerobics, concerned solely with high-speed penetration and ostentatious ejaculation.”

But if there was more of this free range kind based on desire – female desire where there was genuine chemistry between the couple and the woman actually had an orgasm, then perhaps I might be willing to give it a second look. Just maybe! [Until then I’ll stick to property/house porn!]

Chapter two is all about our (really women’s) obsession with removing unwanted hair not just from under arms and legs, but down below as well. She blames this on pornography (being clean shaven is apparently better for filming penetrative shots!) and advocates that women rebel and start to grow a proper muff – a big hairy minge. So no more Brazilians and Hollywoods! Sounds good to me as not only are all these hair removal treatments expensive but they also hurt like hell. But hey, let’s not go into too many details here. Snicker! Snicker!

What’s chapter three about? Breasts! What exactly about breasts? Don’t know as yet but Moran definitely has got my attention and so look forward to speed reading this and the other eleven chapters. So far it’s laugh out loud funny, somewhat irreverent and sexy/dirty – but in the thought provoking kind of way which makes it very acceptable reading for a modern feminist like me!