A book I loved…
I don’t really have all-time favourites, so I picked a book I just finished reading, my current favourite – Girl on the Net: My Not-So-Shameful Sex Secrets.
Aside from being a steamy romp (yeah I just said that) through the sex life of said Girl, it deals with a load of stuff including joyful sluthood, BDSM and consent and teen girl sexuality (I still have a lot of left-over weird guilt over stuff that happened in my teen years, so this helped a lot).
One of mainstream feminism’s issues is the reluctance to see women as willing participants of seemingly ‘abusive’ or ‘humiliating’ sex. It’s often assumed that women can’t possibly enjoy having their faces jizzed on, or being tied up and treated like a sex toy.
For the longest time I found it hard to reconcile my submissive tendencies with my feminist beliefs, mainly because of this toxic view of women’s sexuality. I realise now that a lot of the ‘sex-positive’ feminists I was a fan of weren’t actually positive about any type of sex except vanilla girl-on-top kind of stuff. This book has helped me deal with those issues.
Where some people would view Fifty Shades of Grey as a liberating book, I found it kind of tedious and tame. I found this book, however, to be completely liberating and it answered a lot of questions I didn’t even know I had.
I would really recommend this book. It’s not just sexy, it’s downright educational.
(If you’re not sure how sexy this book is, it includes a whopping 68 instances of the word ‘knickers’ and countless other rude words. Like I said – it’s hot. So go read it.)
…and one I didn’t
It’s been a good while since I read it, but I remember the disappointment that came after finishing Stephen King’s Cell. The whole ‘oh no technology is turning us into mindless zombies’ thing feels waaaaay overdone. I felt there wasn’t that King spark, the thing to set it apart from other books on the same topic.
I love it when writers take a fresh angle on a topic that’s been done to death. But that fresh angle just wasn’t there for me.
It just felt kinda technophobic and overly, idk… judge-y. You’re not supposed to hear the writer when you read a novel, the writing’s supposed to be transparent and just tell the damn story, but I could definitely hear the voice of a disgruntled old man who’s prone to use the phrase ‘back in my day…’
The ending (I won’t spoil it here) raised more questions than it answered and although I like knowing the character’s lives are still continuing on in the story world after I’ve turned the final page, I couldn’t give two shits about the characters in Cell. I wanted at least a tiny bit of resolution at the end. I get that most horror stories don’t have happy endings, or endings at all really but I dunno, I felt Cellcould’ve done with a teeny bit more of a satisfying conclusion. But what do I know, right? King’s a millionaire and here I am, blogging in my dressing gown.
Agoraphobic Feminist: I’m a versatile freelance writer that suffers from depression and panic disorder with agoraphobia. My writing covers a wide range of issues including feminism, equality, social issues and mental health.” (@AtHomeActivist)
