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Author Wiedemann: It takes the fear away from those who fear for their privileges.
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Paula Faraco / Matthes & Seitz
When Harry Styles posed on the cover of US Vogue a few weeks ago in a gray-blue Gucci dress, some celebrated it as a revolutionary act. After all, Styles is the first man with a solo cover for the magazine.
And then he doesn't wear a tailor-made suit, but a lace dress.
Others saw no rebellion against gender clichés in this; they were angry: "Bring back male men."
A right-wing activist tweeted that, over 90,000 people agreed.
Carolin Wiedemann shows in her book "Zart und frei." Why this is not just nonsense, but an anti-feminist, dangerous bite reflex.
The overthrow of the patriarchy ”.
In it, the journalist explains how the criticism of gender politics could become a central point of reference for the New Right.
And why that extends to the liberal left.
Wiedemann, who studied journalism and sociology and worked for several years for the magazine "Frankfurter Allgemeine Quarterly", writes in it as if she was reacting to criticism before it was even expressed.
For example: do we need another book on feminism at all?
Don't we have enough already?
Read enough, learned enough?
"Pinkification" of children's rooms
Wiedemann flips through the past few years like a flip book, from the return of long outdated gender clichés such as the »pinkification« of children's rooms by the figure Princess Lillifee, popular with girls, to #MeToo and the gender pay gap.
The round-up ends in 2020 - when not only does domestic violence increase during the pandemic, but women become more busy looking after children, the home and the hearth, while men have time for scientific papers.
So has enough happened?
Rather not.
Wiedemann neatly links social criticism with the history of feminism and the demands of contemporary queer-feminist movements.
Wiedemann tells so confidently and in such detail that even those who have not yet found Simone de Beauvoir or Margarete Stokowski can get in.
And those who fear for their privileges, it takes the fear.
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Title: Tender and Free: On the Overthrow of Patriarchy
Editor: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Number of pages: 218
Author: Wiedemann, Carolin
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Because hegemonic masculinity suppresses almost everyone, including and even men.
The ethos of achievement, the refusal to help, the hardship against oneself and against others, i.e. all merits that are generally considered to be particularly masculine, curtail and limit everyone.
Toxic masculinity, Wiedemann shows, is also poisonous for men.
Or as Harry Styles told Vogue about his taste in fashion: "Whenever you set up barriers in your own life, you are only restricting yourself." Sometimes a dress can tear them a little.
Anti-feminist backlash
But mostly that's not enough, the author proves.
Because the anti-feminist backlash is enormous - and spills over various milieus.
Right-wing populists use prejudices for their propaganda that also exist in conservative circles.
Sexism and misogyny, for example, camouflage themselves in concerns about speaking bans, male discrimination and the continued existence of the traditional nuclear family.
Catholic anti-abortion opponents, liberal journalists and some leftists, who regard feminism as merely a superfluous additional program in the struggle for social justice, allow patriarchy to regain its strength.
What can you do about it?
Wiedemann provides answers.
Rethink the splitting of spouses, subsidize the sexist division of labor;
dealing with critical masculinity;
Thinking about the family beyond the mother-father-child constellation and gender beyond the binary of man and woman.
Does that mean we should all get queer?
No, replies Wiedemann to her imagined critic.
Being free does not mean "that we are forced to break with current gender identities and forms of desire." But we should deal responsibly with our respective leeway, she argues.
And as long as gender, sexuality, origin and the social milieu determine the size of a scope, we should be open to share.
And then rearrange the scope.
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