By Edward Nawotka

Despite numerous literary luminaries at this past weekend’s Cape Town Book Fair, it’s still the dirty stuff that sells. It seems that the most headline grabbing event of the Fair has been the launch of former stripper and now single-mother Karin Eloff’s Afrikaans-language memoir Stiletto.

“I started hating men,” writes Eloff, “All men. Men, I decided, had one wonderful function: to produce sperm. Emotional support or friendship is not to be expected from the bastards. Men can be decorative and functional, but they’re dumb and unreliable.” She later apologized for using the father of her child, a well known South African soap opera star, as a “mere sperm donor.”

Eloff also received a great deal of attention for criticizing Afrikaans men in particular. “Probably the rudest big- mouthed, unsophisticated roughnecks are Afrikaners,” she said. “Are they scared of women? I think so.” She calls the Indian and English men were “more gentlemanly,” which can’t have helped the situation.

Talk about a foolproof way of drumming up publicity.

READ: More about the book here or HERE.