I read Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman for my book group. A change from our usual fiction but I think it struck a chord with all of us. Described as 'Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool', it was more of a memoir than I expected and it's no analytical feminist treatise, but it's good to read a mainstream writer taking on the big and small issues facing women in the twenty first century, happy to call herself a (strident) feminist. You don't have to agree with Moran's take on every issue - I'm not convinced that increasing the variety of pornography is going to resolve pornography's exploitation of women or that equating sexism with being impolite is necessarily helpful - to be pleased that she's writing about them.
In the book Moran lays open her life, from her teenage years to motherhood. No experience, from masturbation to abortion, seems to be too personal to be opened up for examination. The book is funny and occasionally moving. A lot of it will be instantly recognisable to most women.
How To Be a Woman has been criticised for it's lack of analysis and for focusing primarily on 'surface' issues such as body image, lap dancing and bras, rather than the underlying structural causes of gender inequality. But that would be different book and not what Moran set out to write. This book will be read by people who might not give more serious feminist analysis a second glance. If it can amuse and get people thinking about some of those cultural aspects of inequality and discrimination that often get taken for granted, it will be doing something right.
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