The Movement
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this utopia, the feminist Movement has been successful and women rule the world. Men are trained at reeducation facilities to accept the new normal in this futuristic satire challenging our sexual norms.
The Movement’s founding ideology emphasizes that women should be valued for their inner qualities, and not for their physical attributes. Men have been forbidden to be attracted to women on the basis of their bodies. While some continue unreformed, many submit—or are sent by wives and daughters—to the Institute for internment and reeducation. Our narrator, an unapologetic guard at one of these reeducation facilities, describes how the Movement started, her own personal journey, and what happens when a program fails. She is convinced the Movement is nearing its final victory—a time when everybody will fall in line with its ideals. Outspoken, ambiguous, and terrifying, this socio-critical satire of our sexual norms sets the reader firmly outside of their comfort zone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hůlová (Three Plastic Rooms) offers a thought-provoking and disturbing dystopian tale of a feminist revolution. The Czech Republic's "Old World" government has fallen to "The Movement," a women-led group dedicated to decoupling men's sexual desires from their views of women's bodies. Unisex tracksuits are the only permitted fashion and plastic surgery is among the nation's gravest crimes. The narrator is a guard at The Institute, a reeducation facility that aims to cure men of turning "human beings into objects whose exterior is elevated at the expense of what lies within." Tactics there include electro-shock therapy and forcing patients to masturbate to photos of older women. While many men decry this as torture, "cured" men share their gratitude on TV. The majority of the novel is exposition, with little action until the halfway point, when a patient's suicide prompts another guard to question The Movement. From here, the narrator speaks with a number of women who challenge her tidy image of the "New World." This is most successful as a satirical look at gender essentialism and the difficulty of creating unity after a revolution. It's a worthy thought experiment, but it falls short as a novel.
