Sara Pascoe is here for you. There is no stone she won’t turn over and no story she won’t tell, because she is going to use her embarrassments, misunderstandings, failures, and larks to help you learn.
If you are looking for a medical textbook on what it means to be a human woman then go ahead and look elsewhere. If you want a smart and unflinching comedian to share her life story with you while looking back through biology, history, and cultural norms in order to explain what it is like to grow up female then this is the book for you!
Pascoe is straight, cis, and white- and she makes a point (multiple times, actually) to say that she is not speaking for all female-identifying folks, nor is she speaking on behalf of all human beings regardless of their sexuality while talking about the (ancient) patterns that helped to shape how we feel about whom and what we do with those feelings. If you feel female, then you are female.
Am I rambling? Yes! The time spent listening to this audio book was a delight; Pascoe is smart, warm, honest, and cheeky. Luckily, she narrates the book herself, so you get to hear her tell you about the research rabbit holes that she fell into while also sharing the stories of first loves, bad sex, stand-up comedy, abortion, and having her mom shout to everyone in the checkout line that they were buying supplies for her first period.
I wish that this book had been around when I was a teen; it puts a lot of difficult feelings into perspective without being self-deprecating or twee. She is honest, fierce, and funny; it doesn’t matter if she’s laying out backwards medical ideas of the past, horror stories of her own life, or the disaster that is how modern society handles consent and sexuality. She does not back down, and she will not give up on you.