Sara Pascoe - Animal

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant

Animal is brilliant. I like Sara Pascoe very much so I expected to enjoy it, but it was even better than I expected.

Sara Pascoe is very funny. She is also very intelligent, thoughtful, well informed, honest and insightful. The result is a very readable, often very funny book about human – especially female – sexuality, the female body, it’s workings and people’s attitudes to it. It is full of insight and genuine science, all of which she relates extremely well to our everyday experience. She is also refreshingly direct about topics like menstruation and engagingly - sometimes almost alarmingly - honest and open about her own experiences, emotions and insecurities. I found the sections about how someone so fabulously attractive as she is can still feel dreadfully insecure about how she looks especially helpful to my understanding, and the section on consent/rape is exceptionally good, too.

Pascoe is knowledgeable and intelligent in her approach, while still often being very amusing. For example, she has a genuine grasp of the process of evolution (which is by no means always the case among people who write about it) and she is exceptionally good about acknowledging the things we do not know. This is one of the marks of a true scientist and she refuses to go in for that old, familiar trick of selecting just those (often dubious) bits of evidence which seem to support preconceptions or a political stance and pretending that they form a watertight case. As a result, her conclusions and politics about female sexuality and the way it has been (and still is) misrepresented and abused, body image and so on are all the more powerful, and she makes a very compelling case.

Books on these topics are often worthily turgid; this is anything but. Pascoe is rightly angry about a lot of things, but she channels it into a non-aggressive, engaging, honest and very convincing voice which is fascinating, informative and highly entertaining. Everyone should read it, no matter what your age or gender, and this gent in his mid-60s can recommend it very warmly indeed.

Oh, and Sara – you know the bits where you talk about how you can be in love with someone you’ve never met…?