Curate, connect, and discover
This is one of the things that ultimately loses me from the beginning with Whipping Girl. It is a work interested in reclaiming femininity from its place of degradation in the hierarchy, and that’s… Well I think you end up missing a lot of nuances of things when you claim that femininity is always seen as degrading. How many women in Congress can be accurately described as masculine? How many female singers or actresses are? It ignores the history of females like Helen Hulick or more infamously Joan of Arc whose refusal to bow to the insistence of femininity resulted in legal action/death respectively. This ‘let 👏 everyone👏 Be 👏 feminine 👏’ stuff seems really out of touch. Go outside. Female people are plenty aloud to be feminine and in fact are often alienated by their peers if they aren’t inclined towards it.
But more than that, why must feminism (especially radical feminism) be about femininity and not females? Are there not enough issues to focus on based on sex for a movement to exist with goals focused on it in mind? Perhaps this will be focused on later, but it’s almost anti intersectional to claim the majority of the world supports the idea of men and women as equals. Do females banished to menstruation huts because they are seen as ‘unclean’ and will ‘taint the people around them’ not bleed the same blood as I do? Does the female child undergoing genitalia mutilation out of a sense of tradition and who sees her vagina as something sinful and disgusting not deserve our attention? Does the female forced to give birth against her desires not deserve the right to her own body? Is it not worth it to have a movement dedicated to the rights of half of the population? Maybe this will be addressed at some other point in the novel, I may be making too quick of a judgement.