Thanks to the male gaze – that old thing – literature is saturated with flattening representations of women and their bodies. In fact, hashtags such as “#menwhowritewomen” are dedicated solely to exposing the clichéd language that some authors use to describe their female characters.
Inevitably, this has fed into unrelatable depictions of desire – from reductive ideas about women pining for the marriage-to-kids pipeline, to women not liking sex as much as men. But thankfully, there is a vast ocean of books embracing the reality of women’s desire, in all its messy glory, to set the record straight.
