FEMALE MASTURBATION. Periods. Pubic hair. The menopause. Anxiety. Body-positivity. Coercive control. Fertility problems. Deciding to be child-free. The emotional load. Finding a hat that genuinely suits you and doesn’t make you look either like you’re off to a wedding, or a chimney-sweep.

When it comes to the problems of women, barely a day goes by without a thinkpiece, blog, stand-up set, movie, TV show or song by a woman gleefully opening up on a topic or busting a taboo. We are at a high tide of female honesty and problem-sharing.

This is because women are good at talking to other women about, well, everything. The mythological cultural status of the ladies’ toilets has now become the default setting of art, media and culture made by women. The vibe is ‘Ladies! I am summoning a meeting to talk about ALL THE BULLSHIT. Everyone invited.’

And then last year, I realised – the only problem of women that isn’t being discussed is: men. The men’s toilets are not full of people semi-drunkenly confessing something, and being hugged. There is no online culture of men being bold and candid about their most shameful secrets and anxieties.

And so, in my new book, What About Men?, I resolved to try and transfer the current female vibe of ‘LET’S TALK ABOUT ALL OUR LADY PROBLEMS!’ to the neglected problems of men. And one of the biggest problems I came up against was pornography, and the frankly heartbreaking lack of truly candid conversations about it.

How do you talk to the men in your life about porn? Whether it’s a partner who suddenly wants to try sexual strangulation, or a teenage son whose online activities you fret about, we currently don’t have any relaxed, let alone humorous conversational templates to get the ball rolling, without risking kink-shaming or embarrassment.

And it is something we need to discuss. Anyone born before, say, 1985 thinks of pornography as ‘dirty mags’ or pretty tame VHS tapes bought from shops with blacked-out windows. Anyone born after will have come of age, literally, in a world of strangulation, spitting, slapping, ‘naughty stepdaughters’, hentai and double penetration. It’s a chunky list.

When it comes to your own sexual partners, woman after woman I know – newly single and out on the dating scene for the first time in decades – was shocked at what male partners now thought was ‘normal’. If sexual strangulation is your thing, fine: but when it suddenly happens on a first date, with no prior discussion, it can, as one friend ruefully said, ‘Really cross the line from “exciting novelty” to “am I going to die?”’

But while women are discussing the impact modern porn has made on men with other women, it feels like they cannot talk about it with men – and that men are not discussing it with other men at all. For my book, I talked to one young man who started watching porn aged 10 – ‘That’s the average age, to be honest’ – who, by 15, had found it dominated his fantasies so completely that, ‘When I was having sex with girlfriends, I’d be thinking: I’d rather be watching porn instead.’

We have to ask ourselves: how have we managed to screw up sex so badly for young people? Foxes manage to do it on shed roofs, in the rain, with no problems at all. But clever, complex humans and their technology seem to have made it, ironically, more difficult.

And porn does make sex more difficult: for boys and men, because it depicts an often bleak and intimidating idea of sex. There seems to be no room for male vulnerability and tenderness, average willies, normal bodies, conversation, intimacy, giggling, weird farty noises, pubic hair, or any kind of human connection. While women have been making jokes about the aesthetics of porn for years – all the super-ripped bodies and frankly dangerous-looking nails – young men are just supposed to accept and want porn, because: tits! Shagging! Wahey! Get in there!

It’s almost as if the main consumers of this $97bn industry – men – haven’t realised that you’re allowed to take the piss out of it, question it. Examine how it makes you feel. And start talking with your friends and partners about how it’s impacted you.

In 2023, I wish for boys and men what I wished for women and girls back in 2011, when I wrote How To Be A Woman: that they could find a way to be frank, vulnerable and honest when talking about their problems. That men could have the kind of conversations we hear in the ladies’ toilets all the time: ‘Do you find this weird? This makes me anxious. Someone seems to be making money out of something that makes me feel bad about myself. I want things to change.’

‘What About Men?’ by Caitlin Moran is out 6 July (Ebury)