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Lifting the loincloth: do we need to take down nudes – or look at them harder?

The Royal Academy’s major exhibition of nudes will feature equal numbers of naked men and women. Is this progress?

Things look different after #MeToo. And not just after #MeToo, but after several years of a surging fourth wave of feminism. There has been fury against patriarchy – with the term itself, after decades of dormancy, surging back into use to explain everything from the rise of Donald Trump to sexual violence in India to pay inequality in western Europe.

Everywhere, dams of silence and fear are bursting, as women speak out about wrongs committed by men whose powerful positions once rendered them unassailable. Women have also rewritten the private stories they have told themselves (or buried) about their lives, from family relationships to workplace troubles to sexual encounters. In this atmosphere of revisionism, new stories have been needed. Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person, published at the end of 2017 in the New Yorker, owed its viral success to a wave of recognition from female readers. It told a story about dating and sex that seemed intensely true but, till then, barely told.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BSIBDe
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