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Women are not virgins waiting to be plucked
No matter how you square the gender/sex “debate”, invariably gender critical voices essentially reduce women down to wombs, gametes, and chromosomes. They assume womanhood is crystalised down to an ability to reproduce, that making babies is all there is to being a woman. Essentially, if you are not a female virgin waiting to be plucked you are not worthy of being labelled a woman. Yes, of course this is reductive of many arguments, but the essence of gender critical discourse is that a woman is only worthy of the term if she bleeds five days a month.
Of course all of this would have every first wave feminist rolling in her grave, the battles they fought for emancipation from child rearing for nought. If a woman is policed and defined based on what others need her for, then that is hollow indeed. Conceptions of purity and virginity are weaponised to keep women in their place, and while there are certainly male predators who seek to harm women, there is a constant industrial scale fear industry seeking to bind women closer to the men in her life. Anti-feminists point to the dangers out in the dark and state that the only way to prevent them is for women to be pliable to whatever they socially construct womanhood to be. Dad’s purity ring to his teenage daughter is as an effective a shield as a chocolate tea pot to hot tea.
