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Over at Salon, Amanda Marcotte expresses enthusiasm for secret ballots because of concerns that husbands are forcing wives to vote for Trump:
She also thinks it would be good if wives used emotional blackmail to control men's votes:
Oddly enough, there is no mention of the issue posed by absentee ballots. These are the tools by which abusive spouses can use anything from cajoling to emotional abuse to outright violence to dictate the votes of those that reside with them. The only way to make sure this isn't an option is returning to the canonical secret ballot, which is in a voting booth where this is no option to show others who you voted for. Notably, this is a protection against other forms of coercion, such as from employers or caregivers.
Marcotte comes as close as I've seen anyone on the progressive side of things has gotten to acknowledging this problem, but somehow elides the solution to this fundamentally solved problem. Kind of interesting dynamic.
Marcotte is a strange single issue writer. Click on her byline and almost every headline has either "Trump" or "MAGA" in it. She is THE face of 3rd wave feminist Trump Derangement Syndrome. It truly is a bizarre obsession. It seems to me that her writing is intended for an audience of cosmopolitan women who sincerely think that a Trump election = overnight Handsmaid's Tale coming into reality. It's some sort of sexual-political BDSM LARPing because there's never a consistent causal train of thought. I've had conversations with these folks in person. They cannot articulate how the Constitution would actually be suspended or voided. There's a logical gap that's forded with vibes based projections and catastrophizing. Allusion to Nazi Germany are not uncommon.
In the end, doesn't it come to "the ruling party is united enough behind the desire to change the laws and the Constitution that they just do it"? What would stop them?
If you believe that the republicans all want to enact Handmaid's Tale then it's pretty rational to not expect the procedure to stop them.
No.
A whole shitload of precedent and existing laws.
To somehow morph the constitution enough that individual lights could be altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions, you'd have to, at the very least, pass a bunch of amendments. Not laws, amendments. This requires ratification by 2/3rds of the states. I don't think there's anything, right now or in the foreseeable future, that 2/3rds of the states could agree on fast enough to accomplish this within a 4 - 8 year presidency and also assume zero turnover in congress. Along the way, I also assume there would be dozens of court challenges.
Remember that, for a few years, the Republicans really mad an effort to overturn The Affordable Care Act. They got close but failed. The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.
Altering the constitution (in the opposite direction of its original intent) would require an amazing level of sustained, focused, hyper coordinated action. Without any room for even mild electoral losses or turnover. While also assuming something like court packing happening in parallel. And ... in a single 4 year Trump admin?
It's a goofy catastrophy-porn scenario. Congress is fucking up its basic budgetary requirements. The Republican majority kicked out their own speaker. But, we're supposedly to believe that if Orange Man gets a sequel (which will almost certainly be decided by less than 300k votes) all of a sudden 2/3rds of the states and 3/4ths of their population will get out their well concealed ChristoFascist playbooks and get to work.
I never watched (or read) it and only know it through cultural osmosis, but why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?
What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/464243-photographer-defends-wedding-photo-with-handmaids-tale-theme/
I mean, we have real misogynistic dystopia at home! (Or rather abroad)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68634700
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/6dyf0y/why_women_are_so_entranced_by_the_handmaids_tale/
Umm, if the women who watch the handmaid's tale find themselves identifying with the protagonist as an unloved sexual object, then perhaps it's not because they hate their husbands. Perhaps it's situationships, hookups, and casual dating- after all, the handmaid's tale's audience is pretty hardcore liberal/progressive and likely more onboard with such things, and women seem to dislike actually being in them even if they won't demand commitment before sex.
But those, as far as I know, aren't present in the novel/series at all, so the latter won't have a message that resonates with women who feel wronged by bad hookups/one-night stands/dates/flings.
Sex without love or commitment by men who treat the protagonist as property, however, is.
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"Marriage is just a prostitution-exclusivity agreement that costs a lot" is a line I don't see used much despite its trivial truth for most relationships, probably because the higher-quality people tend to end up in marriages that claim doesn't hold for.
It appeals to Boomers and their children that uncritically parrot all of their grievances (and because "literally feeling oppressed" is both a fetish and a worldview that scores you political points). Meanwhile, modern women just don't get married since they're stable all by themselves (though their parents' policies have put this in jeopardy, that also applies to the men); if you're going to sell your body corporate pays better than domestic to the point that the two-income trap that tends to create puts women who aren't so modern in a disadvantageous position.
So basically, it's 177013 for women.
Hat tip for the hentai reference! The crucial difference in terms of social context, of course, is that 177013 never got the benefit of having a 5-season TV series with full normie appeal getting based on it. This is the reality of current society.
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Man, that post is a blackpilled take completely divorced from reality.
Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published. Sure, very few women have ever actually read it, but even fewer men have - that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)
It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha. Horseshoe theory strikes again, I guess. Something something Hlynka?
The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives. But the tonal and thematic differences between stories like 50 Shades (or John Norman's Gor series, which has some female fans as well though it's mostly aimed at men) and The Handmaid's Tale are pretty dramatic. I haven't seen the TV show, but no part of the book makes it sexy or appealing even to men who like the idea of dominating women or women who like the idea of a domineering man. The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists. I can't say I can speak for Afghani women but let's say I have grave doubts about Dread Jim's belief that those women and ISIS brides are actually living in sexually satisfied bliss being literally owned by men who treat them as chattel. The women who are really into Christian Gray imagine a billionaire giving them his undivided attention and care - the point of the fantasy is that even if he's rough and controlling, he only has eyes for plain little ol' her, and they have super-hot sex, but then she's allowed to continue living her life as the cherished object of a rich man who's actually devoted to her happiness, not a religious fanatic who will beat her if she lets another man see her elbow.
Well, I'm not a Westerner, so I'm not really qualified to comment on that. The OP claims "it's a popular book in hardcore womens' studies programs, but not too well-known elsewhere". The "hardcore" part is maybe unwarranted if I want to be completely fair, but otherwise I find the assessment correct. Maybe I should make the nuanced argument that it was relatively well-known among suburban middle-class Blue Tribe women / wine moms / soccer moms and generally women that are exposed to feminist doctrine.
Well, I guess you're right, but that probably has a lot to do with recent cultural trends of SF, YA, fan fiction and similar literary genres being increasingly captured by feminists.
I'd say he argues that it's essentially true because feminist doctrine has become wholly normalized among Blue Tribe middle-class suburban women.
No, The Handmaid's Tale used to be famous mostly for being a work of dystopian fiction. Its feminist themes were quite obvious, but it wasn't just wine moms and women's studies majors reading it. I know a lot of other SF fans who did, for example.
Margaret Atwood has been a big literary name for years. She's written a lot of other well known books (and used to be known for writing sci-fi dystopias while sort of disdainfully avoiding the "science fiction" label).
I don't think you accurately capture the argument about why incels and manosphere activists believe the same thing radical feminists do (essentially, that the sexes hate each other and we can't really be happy with each other without reordering society in some way - both sides essentially arguing "the opposite sex must be put under our boot").
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It's a well known in certain circles finding that happiness, for American women, is correlated with traditional style marriages in a religious context. I'd like to see if the same finding holds true in Turkey, Iran, etc. In other words, Islamic marriages which are more contractual and put women on a lower level compared to men.
For most people here, "traditional style" marriage means something like "Husband is the head of household and primary breadwinner, wife takes care of the house and children, wife defers to husband in most matters but still has a voice and expects her needs and desires to be taken seriously, and should not be abused or cheated on."
People who think "traditional style" marriage means the husband is lord and master, does whatever he pleases, and she will shut up and take it because that is her role, are not describing real traditions, though they may be describing certain subcultures. The average Muslim woman certainly doesn't consider that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be like.
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It is important to note that the female fantasy is to replace their husband with the 6/6/6 alpha, while the male fantasy is to add the barely-legal bikini model to a harem with their wives. Men are polygamous, women are serially monogamous, because a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, while a man can get multiple women pregnant at the same time.
Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.
why you think so?
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If you're a guy who got dumped for a 6/6/6, you're now unmarried and free to look for another wife. If you're a wife who got sidelined for a bikini model, you're still married but receive only half (likely much less) of the commitment, and there's now one less woman for the rest of the men in society, statistically leaving one man completely without a match. It does look like the man's fantasy as you described it is the evil one.
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What makes wanting an attractive and successful husband evil?
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That's, uh, quite a take.
You know, I have said this before and I'll say it again: evolutionary psychology has a lot of explanatory power, but humans are not hardwired circuits of evolutionary psychology. We are not spermatazoa and eggs being inexorably guided towards union in our every thought and action by chthonic reproductive forces. (And if we were - if what women do is just their evolved natures - then how is it "evil"?) At the very least, you must acknowledge we all live on various bell curves, in which some of us adhere to the "modal male/modal female" behavior more than others.
Detached from evpsych "Why women are evil hypergamous whores" arguments, I think the moral claim that it's "more evil" to want to replace your spouse with a hotter spouse than to want to make your spouse part of a harem is pretty weak. Why should a man find it more objectionable that his wife harbors desires to fuck another man instead of him than a woman should find it objectionable that her husband harbors desires to fuck other women in addition to her?
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The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.
Neverthless, it's true that Atwood's book never makes the sex seem appealing at all, and there's only a couple of instances of "sex scenes", if you can call them that. I haven't seen the show, either, but all the publicity makes it seem rather more culture-warrish than the book which, if I remember correctly, only contains one line about abortion (offhand remark by Offred that she can't even remember why everyone cared about legal abortion so much since in the book's present-day society everyone wants, more than anything, to be fertile) and scarcely more than that about gays or lesbians. It's really more of a personalized "what would I do if enslaved by a tyrannical society" thing than about the exact details of the society itself.
Atwood seems to have leaned into the narrative about it being modern-day anti-GOP commentary in recent interviews, but then again, she has just received quite a bit more of publicity than she had before and that sort of a thing creates an easy need to cater to your new audiences.
You're right, my bad (memory).
I am not surprised that Atwood today is more willing to have it read as an allegory about the Republican Right, but at least when I read it in the 80s, it was more nuanced and less overtly contemporary culture war.
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It’s effective because it’s pretty realistic. And by “realistic” I mean it’s basically what already happened in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 80s with the serial numbers filled off. Margaret Atwood used to explicitly say this, but she’s gradually memory-holed that in favor of the book being a metaphor for the dark days of Ronald Reagan’s America. It’s a way for liberal women to freak out about the rollback of women’s rights in the global south, and fear that it could happen here too, without saying any politically incorrect things about politically protected groups.
The plain truth of the matter is that women's liberation as a concept was never politically normalized in any of those countries at any point of their history except for a rather small elite in the capital. There was no progress for the fundamentalists to roll back, realistically speaking.
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But, how exactly? I don’t see how “Afghanistani social norms suddenly get transposed onto the USA” makes for a more realistic horror than most other horror stories available. In fact, the scenario as written is completely uncoupled from the reality of life in the USA. As pointed out in the Exiled article, the horror of most Americans is not “too much religion” controlling people, but the realities of corporate America. Which is to say that Corporate runs American culture and life to such a degree that most families are forced to kennel any kids they actually have within 8 weeks of having them so they can go back to being a duel income family and seeing the baby after 6pm on weekdays (until bedtime) and weekends. And the horror of living in decaying cities where you can get jumped by thugs but can’t protect yourself from them.
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Except the handmaid's tale might be closer to what goes on in Islamic societies than it is to a hypothetical patriarchal Christian theocracy in the modern west, but it's still not particularly close. The only similarity is women not having rights.
The problem being that women “having rights” is really a subset of corporate control over America. What the rights mean, effectively is that women want to be free to work and have careers and be good little consume-product-bots. Freedom in the modern world is more of a brand than anything else. You’re free to choose what sectors of the economic engine you want to be a battery for, and which consumer demographics you want to buy the imagery of. But beyond that, we’re pretty constrained as more and more of the decisions we used to be able to make are things you can get unjobbed for saying where the wrong people can hear you, and your daily tasks are set by people in offices a thousand miles away. And your free time is spent watching whatever entertainment LA thinks is cool and of course must espouse Goodthink. Which is exactly why I think the fears of Christian Nationalism are not realistic— it would cost the economy too much money, and too many potential wage-slaves to have half of the American population shoved into kitchens to cook and clean. It would half the disposable income per household and thus fewer bobbles sold, less wine, fewer meals out.
I think the “fear” feels a bit like the wrangling over 50 Shades of Grey also seen at the time as a terrible misogynist novel in which women were shown the dark side of S&M and date rape. Except the main audience of the book was women who just couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Not because they were afraid of it or repulsed by it. It was because they wanted a man to make them feel like Grey made his woman feel. I get the same vibe from Handmaid. They want some outside events to force them to stop working their stressful job for a boss they hate while their baby hits all their milestones at daycare. They want a world where all they have to worry about is cooking and cleaning and hugging their babies. But since they aren’t supposed to want that it’s sublimated as horror. Wouldn’t it be horrible if they were forced into living like a tradwife? Don’t you know that Trump wants to do that?
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From the excellent http://exiledonline.com/old-exile/vault/books/review103.html
Thanks for confirming that the old Exile archives are indeed freely available online, at least in part. The observations in this article are even more striking when you consider that Dolan is pretty much an average economic leftist and feminist, as far as I can tell.
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I've heard it said that Atwood intended the original novel as a satire on Iran, as a sort of "imagine if this happened here" sort of scenario - an interpretation that the TV show largely ignores, as I understand it.
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Because progressives fail the ideological turing test. They don't know what real life western patriarchalists think, believe, and advocate. The handmaid's tale is current thing horror porn, so it gets the nod.
Isn’t it more female sexual fetish and fear? Rich man can’t help himself but want the young fertile woman and takes her. And the flip side is the partner who is aging but can’t compete with the young fertile woman.
It taps into both female desires and fears.
I don't think that's it because 'super powerful rich dude just has to have the protagonist and won't let things like morals/respect for individual rights/her lack of interest get in the way' is already a romance genre and it doesn't seem much like the handmaid's tale.
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I'm pretty skeptical.
There's definitely women with the general kink of being 'taken' (or assigned) by someone with near-ultimate power -- if you're a sub, there's a lot to like in a fantasy of being desired this sort of nonspecific way, where you're responsible for doing things but not making decisions, with clear and immediate and recoverable punishments for failure.
((Hell, there's guys with that kink, either in the 'oh do I want to be part of a harem servicing the guy/girl who will take up my control', or the rarer and more anatomically-implausible variants. For those interested in the former and not averse to m/m stuff, tatsuchan18's S4S series is a good, if sparkledoggy, glimpse for what subs are looking for.))
But it doesn't look anything like Handmaid's Tale, either the film or story version. Virtually no one in Handmaid's Tale is actually horny; 'legitimate' sex here is about power, most explicitly with the monthly 'duties'. The closest description to sexual enjoyment the books provide is one Wife who got more pleasure from holding her husband's handmaid down, and a brothel that ends up being much more for the one-pump-chumps than any serious desire or demand. The handmaids aren't even trophy wives. Rather than rules being consistent and the penalties being capricious(ly enjoyable), the rules are capricious while the penalties are permanent and ironclad.
It's horror porn. Atwood literally threw every misogynistic law or social norm that she had ever heard a rumor about into a jar, shook the jar a bunch, and wrote what came out. It's incoherent as such, even compared to a lot of the slave harem porn fantasies, but any intent for the work to be speculative fiction was stapled on at the end.
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It's basically an erotic rape fantasy. Mocked by this meme: https://imgur.com/a/EGjKmW8
It was most likely inspired by Margaret Atwood hearing about how in the 70s places like Beirut and Damascus went from being popular gay vacation spots to having all women covered.
Of course the blue tribe women watching it couldn't admit either of those things. So they claimed it was a profound warning about Trump.
That all seems rather far-fetched.
There's a tendency to overstate the matter -- while parts of the Ottoman Empire largely ignored male homosexual behavior, much of the post-Ottoman Empire turned religious bans on homosexual acts into civil law ones, either under local pressures or Western ones; there were complex social and sometimes legal norms against 'effeminacy' that weren't quite a ban on gay stuff but sometimes got used that way; a lot of this is graded on a pretty heavy curve given explicit and enforced bans in Western countries in the 1950-1960s -- but they definitely had a dedicated western European fandom even into 1972-1973.
((Uh, not always in good ways. A lot of the western gay tourist culture used 'boy' in the sense of 'adult twink', and a number didn't.))
The various civil wars were a good part of it, various migrations (both in response to Israel and to refugee flight) another part, increasing Islamist fear/demonization of 'Westernized' culture yet another, both in relationship to homosexuality and for treatment of women.
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It is fascinating to me that the same people who worry about Trump creating the Handmaid’s tale are the same people who support immigration from MENA
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Because right around the time Trump got elected, they came out with a show and it caught on with blue tribe women. That's really it. I think if the show didn't exist you wouldn't hear so many of those comparisons.
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I have a hard time suspending my disbelief.
On the show, every few hundred feet along the sidewalk in built-up areas is stationed a Guardian (ersatz Gestapo goon) armed with a semi-automatic. There would have to be PLA-level manpower available to the regime for this to be possible. And you can't just give this job to any schlub; it has to be a fanatic who wouldn't hesitate to shoot his own mother or sister if she broke the laws (which include that women are no longer allowed to be literate in this society!)
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I don't know if the book is better, but the show is awful. It just beats you over the head again and again about how evil this society is and doesn't ever really do much else. Which is a shame because there's the building blocks of a compelling alternate reality in there.
A more measured version that a) has an actual story rather than the main character just glowering at the camera like she's about to go and do something (but never does) and b) prioritizes making Gilead believable over making it horrifying could have been really interesting.
Instead we get nonsense like the "her fault" chant.
Honestly, that’s the modern rot of Hollywood. I don’t know why but they seem to believe that unless you hit the audience over the head with the message that the Evil Regime is Evil and has no redeeming qualities, the audience will miss the point. Maybe I’m odd for reading a lot of medieval and renaissance history, but even then when the Church was very powerful and the concept of human rights was 300 years away and they still didn’t create societies with no redeeming qualities. They cared about stability and their own wealth and power, they had to be strong enough to fend off rivals. But they didn’t really spend a lot of time dreaming up ways to oppress the locals.
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Like what?
I liked the idea of exploring a world where fertility was much more rare and the way that changed society. The central concept of the fertile women becoming "handmaids" that were highly valued for their ability to bear children was genuinely interesting. But the women were treated so brutally that it kept taking me out of it - even if you're treating these women like livestock, you would still treat them like valuable livestock. I also would have liked to see the ideology and values of Gilead treated more seriously rather than as a fake veneer that no one actually believed in.
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I think the book is better primarily because it doesn't overstay its welcome. Season 1 of the show is the story that's in the book, everything else is just made up by the show. So I think the narrative is stronger in the book because it is tighter in scope.
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I don't suppose it's plausible in its totality, but Margaret Atwood's research strategy for the book was to combine cultural practices from real societies into a single place and time. So it's more grounded than many dystopian fictions.
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Yes, softcore porn. It's 1984 meets 50 Shades of Grey.
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