So, here’s a thing that too many male authors do. They want to describe a woman, and they want to make it clear that she’s a woman. She's a sexual being, you know? She's a woman! All feminine and full of the good stuff, like ovaries and a uterus and other bodily bits that men just don't have. She's a woman. Not a man. Very different things. He's flesh and blood and bone. She's flesh and blood and… breasts. That’s important to remember. Women have breasts. Big breasts are good, because that way you know that they’re a woman. Otherwise, you might not notice the breasts and you might get them confused with men, and that would be bad, because men and women are different. Men don't have breasts, for one thing. That's probably the biggest difference between men and women.

The other difference is that men and women's narratives aren't the same, because men make narratives and women have narratives happen to them. Men's stories are about men doing man things, like going on journeys and meeting people and overcoming personal obstacles at great peril and awe-inspiring triumph, and women's stories are about them doing woman things, like having sex with men against their will and being chopped up and dying and still looking kind of hot when they're dead, because they have breasts. Until their breasts are chopped off, of course.

So, how do you make it clear that your character is a woman? Do you describe her innermost thoughts? No, you can't really do that when the character is just a passing person and the story is told in the third person. Well, do you rely on that pesky little pronoun, 'she'? Maybe. But 'she' is so subtle, isn't it? Where's the fun in 'she'? What if it's still not clear that your character is a woman? What if your reader skips past the 'she' and makes the terrible assumption that your character might be a man? You could always rely on the whole idea that women's stories are different, and describe your character getting chopped up or sold to a man or forced to have sex with her father, but that takes time. It's not immediate. How do you make it instantly clear that this is a woman, not a man? How do you differentiate?

Luckily, male authors the world over have discovered a foolproof way to get past this, and that is by relying on the other important difference between men and women, and making sure that you mention her breasts. Constantly. Every few pages, if necessary. She's walking downstairs? Great! Make sure that you mention how her breasts are jiggling. She's on a bus? Fantastic! Don't forget to describe how her breasts move up and down! She's lying down? Phenomenal! What effect does gravity have on her breasts? Don't neglect to go into detail! She's standing nearby? Awesome! Make certain that we know how big her breasts are, because that says a lot about who she is as a character. As a woman. With breasts.

This book is 81 pages long, discarding the afterword. This book mentions breasts on 12 separate occasions, and there are not 12 female characters in this book. When the narrator is a man, he notices the breasts of the women around him. When the narrator is a female, she thinks about her own breasts. When the narrator is telling a story that someone else has told to him, that person also conveniently notices other women's breasts. Breasts are mentioned once every 6.75 pages in this book. That's a whole lot of tit.

And the thing is, I get that the women in this book have terrible things happen to them. I get it. What I don't get is why the author feels the need to eroticise it. A dead woman is laid out on a rock, and he thinks about her breasts, and compares them to the breasts of a woman he saw on a bus. A woman is raped by her father and we're told that he does it because he can't resist her breasts. A man thinks about his sister, who has grown up since he saw her last, and notices how large her breasts are and how they 'jerk and move'.

This eroticised violence doesn't come across as critical. We're not invited to say 'boy, this is horrible, isn't it? Isn't it terribly sexist that he's about to chop up a woman's dead body and he's distracted by how great her tits are?' Instead, we're invited to look at these woman alongside the narrator. The author places a friendly arm around our shoulders and pulls us in, and tells us it's OK to look. It's OK to turn these women into objects, or into one body part. It's fine, because they're women, and that's how women function in narratives! They're there to be looked at, aren't they? They're there to be sexual. To have things done to them. We might as well join in. They're not real, after all.

Honestly, the women in this book are all like that dead woman in the first story. None of them is alive, or human, or a woman. They're all just mammaries.