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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
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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