Thank you for the article. I think that many people will find your interpretation to be sensible, thorough and on point.

I just want to share some of my thoughts.

I didn’t like the movie.

I do feel that neither the male director nor the male author of the book on which the movie is based knew what it means to be a woman or, really, any human being.

Nothing in this movie surprised me and everything looked...perfect and banal?

The masturbation scene looked as if it was a “stereotypical boy “ doing it for the first time — we boys do, however, struggle with that. No pain, no discomfort, no troubles, no blood, no nothing? I mean I don’t know how it happens exactly with women but it looked a bit too easy and unproblematic. Just fun? When I had my first involuntary ejaculation, I went crying to my mom because I had no idea what was happening with my body. I imagine that for women it’s, psychologically, not just fun but many other things too.

There was nothing about menstruation in the movie, which seems to me as something so fundamental and significant to the female experience.

Again, maybe I’m wrong.

Most roles that Bella portrays are unsurprising: a daughter, a love interest, a prostitute, “an emancipated woman who finds an intellectual way of being”. Maybe an alcoholic was a bit unusual. Still, it seems to me that having sex and getting drunk is how men stereotypically perceive adulting. It’s like that behaviour was just copied and applied to a woman while putting her in stereotypical roles and dresses. Why didn’t she wear something different? Walk naked in the street? Run away to a forest? She was having so much fun killing a frog, why not do something with that further? Why doesn’t she go and kill someone?

She doesn’t do anything unusual, truly creative, surprising — and growing up, we all do, that, don’t we?

This didn’t look like a movie about a unique human being whose name is Bella Baxter.

Bella was just a tool to communicate an intellectual idea pushed forward by the men who created her, but I could rarely connect with her as with someone who really tries to explore herself, her body and the world around her.

The movie wants us to believe that Bella doesn’t follow the rules of the patriarchy, but to me it seemed like that’s exactly what she was doing — following all the rules, only in a more brash and reckless way.

That’s what I felt when watching this movie.