petitefeministe:

Laurie Penny on Caitlin Moran’s How To Be a Woman:

Being a feminist this summer is pretty exciting. It’s like we’ve all been at some dull charity drinks reception and someone has hit the lights, jacked some power ballads into the speaker system and said: ladies – let’s get messy.

First, there were the SlutWalks, when all at once, as if from nowhere, brave, angry women all over the world were standing in their scanties in the street, screaming about sex and class and patriarchy.

Now there’s How to Be a Woman.

Caitlin Moran’s new tome isn’t your classic feminist handbook. It’s as much about taking ecstasy and being a gobby teenage music journalist in the 1990s as it is a total rundown of the existential dilemmas of western womanhood. It’s the gutsy, smutty autobiography of a rockstar feminist, exquisitely well-written, stained with fag ash and memories.

Really, this book would have been better titled How to Be Caitlin Moran. It’s not the story of everywoman, but of one smart, successful middle-class British woman who grew up poor and overweight and now gets paid a great deal of money to be knicker-wettingly funny about a lot of important things. And that’s precisely what makes it so brilliant. It’s a powerful and, one suspects, deliberate riposte to the ghastly ghostwritten memoirs of “role models” such as Katie Price, who Moran describes as “Vichy France with tits”, at which point I punched the air, alone with the book in my bedroom.

This book is funny. Like all the best feminist writing, it laughs in the face of power. Even better, it’s dirty. Sex oozes out between the pages. I’m talking about real sex: not the boring, sterile porn producer’s vision of female sexuality that Moran critiques, nor the staid Carrie Bradshaw model whereby one is only allowed to fuck in $500 Manolos, but real sex, all smut and silliness and horny teenage wanking sessions with one eye on an unlockable bathroom door. It’s like My Secret Garden as written by Lady Gaga in a skip in Wolverhampton, with knob gags.

The filthy glee with which Moran describes her mattress-cracking desire for her own husband, the shuddering frustration with which she declares that she just wants to see, somewhere on the internet, a video of an actual woman having an actual orgasm, is compelling precisely because it is so rare. This is what feminism needs right now. Not another boring list of timid complaints, nor a pinkly patronising explanation of why you don’t have to stop shaving your legs just because you believe in equal pay – but a bit of filth, a bit of hope, and a lusty bucketful of courage. This book is not a revolution, or a call to arms. It’s a paperback. But it’s a damn good start.

Still trying to work out how to fit this onto my already enormous list of summer reading… I will find a way!