Ceridwen

I've been listening to this sort of rom-com pulp while elbows deep in repetitive tasks that occassionally make my attention wander. I deep six at least half of them halfway due to rank stupidity or weird sexism. This one for both. Main girl is a college student who is also a major fangirl for some actor. The opening bits with her Twitter use were patently ridiculous, but fine, we're not in a novel built on hard realism, whatever. 

It was main girl's experiences in a woman's studies class that broke me. First off, it is understood that said woman's studies class is a required class. No. That is not a thing that happens. Second, main girl is a not-until-marriage type, and all the evil feminists who people said required class (why wouldn't it just be a cross section of regular students? This is a required class after all) rag on her for not "owning her sexuality" or whatever. Why aren't you fucking everything that moves to prove you're woke and shit?

Also no. This is written by someone who has never read one page of feminist lit, and doubly hasn't encountered second wave feminist tracts that posit that all sex is rape. Like, I don't think that is the case, but it is not an impossible feminist stance to take. I don't even know what wave of feminism we're on, but most of them include not fucking people if you don't want to, for whatever reason. Feminists are big on bodily autonomy, so any intrusion, without consent, is completely not ok. Consent being the operative. Ragging on the celibate is the kind of dumb bullshit people like to imagine feminists, and especially academic feminists, do for funsies.

Maybe it would be more likely someone would criticize her celibacy as purity ring bullshit based on weird fuck-daddy stuff. Like, if you think of your virginity as some kind of transactional capitalist chit that you only dole out when you've been given a compensatory social prize, i.e. marriage, then maybe you have some fucked up ideas about gender. But no one would be down on her for not having sex, per se.

Maybe if the main relationship had been anything but rote blah I would have soldiered on. Admittedly, it's hard to rally for a character who has irked me with her bullshit, so that may be a factor in my discontent. I ended up listening to an elegiac zombie novel instead, which I have enjoyed immensely. Sex and death, bitches.