Thorns

I really agree with this. One of the ways I try and combat it in my own writing (though I know there's still a lot of conditioning and internalised stuff coming through) is to have a pretty vast variety of female characters, and also to not just...mirror reverse everything. And I think as you say, if a work really does best having multiple representations of feminist subjects, then it stands to reason that you cannot hold up one text as 'THE feminist text' but - if fiction is the metaphor here - take up a bunch of multiple representative works and look at them all. And yeah, I don't think I could watch a video of violent women (just as I can't of violent men), since that kind of stuff squicks me pretty hard. So...there definitely needs to be a very multifaceted, polysemic idea of what a good feminist text is. There is no Best Feminist Story, only the personal 'this was the Best Feminist Story To Me' which is so different.