Charlotte Roche, if you haven’t heard of her, is the author of Wetlands, a book that opens with an 18-year-old girl recovering in hospital from an accident that occurred while she was shaving her intimate areas (not her words). It goes on to detail her every biological excretion, bodily function and sexual proclivity. Roche says the book started as a polemic on the tyranny of female sexual hygiene, but it has ended up as a warts-and-all exposé of the parts that aren’t ever discussed — not to mention the dirty secrets of female sexuality. The book has sold more than half a million copies in Germany (it’s published here this week), either because Germans are weird, or because it deals head-on with stuff that some women, and many more men, are still in denial about.

Its message is timely. Wetlands will hit the shelves shortly before the new diet-pill sensation, Alli, the drug that promotes weight loss by preventing the body from absorbing fat. The side effects of this over-the-counter wonder are diarrhoea and flatulence, but that small detail will not deter women from guzzling Alli by the fistful. In unscientific trials, six out of 10 consumers admitted they would wear incontinence knickers on dates if it meant they could slip on a Galaxy dress and still see their hip bones protruding by the end of the evening.

The connection between the stir caused by an explicit book about women’s bodies and a diet pill is this: our self-imposed conspiracy of silence. Women are woman-sized: we have spare tyres and cellulite; we sweat when hot; we go to the loo, both ends; we have body hair all over the place, not just in one perfect fig-leaf outline, like a Love Is . . . cartoon; and we are perfectly capable of developing nail fungus, verrucas, moustaches, chin hairs, bad breath, spots on our bums and bristles on our calves.

We know all this, and yet we pretend to the outside world that the feminine fairy has waved her wand and made us 100% fragrant and effluent-free. This denial would be relatively harmless were it not for the fact that it allows men to believe that women are all alabaster mannequins who smell of roses. And then we expect them to be good at sex, to hold our hands in the delivery room, to hold more than our hands in the birthing pool. It just doesn’t add up.

Of course, the argument is that men can’t handle the reality — they want to believe we are all cartoon princesses under our leather jackets. But that’s only peppermint cashmere-wearing men, surely? And, anyway, they all find out the sordid truth at some stage, because who can afford all the top-up waxing once you start actually living together? Plus, at some point, you have to admit it was no accident you bought the nasal-hair tweezers. He knows what you’re doing in the bathroom. Ladies: relax.

How to Meet a Man After Forty and Other Midlife Dilemmas Solved (Penguin £7.99) is out now

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