She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once. It was the waning days of second-wave feminism, and all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced. Surely this was not the entire picture; surely there was some power in their sex. Alice was both attractive and restrained, and this made her feel superior, even as she witnessed Professor Grimes disappearing into hotel rooms with other women
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