To illustrate. When I was in England, man who’d killed his SO would say
Killed the cheatin slut. She deserved it.
Reported as “Man kills partner”.
Here he says
“Killed my wife, she was cheating on me”.
Reported a s" Women killed for honour".
Honour killings do happen, but the newest trend seems to be to define them as anytime a woman gets murdered.
Note: the rates above of women being murdered are based on the number of women murdered compared to the total population of the country, both men and women.
As far as your remark about “what a horrible person” v. “what horrible people” goes, please note that the great difference in rates of violence against women between our countries very much is a reflections of the different cultures, unless you a proposing that you country has a much higher proportion of horrible persons irrespective of their environment.
Very incisive. There are so many gloom-and-doomers on both sides of the spectrum who are extremely resistant to accepting the reality that the world not only isn’t going to hell in a handbasket, but has massively reduced poverty, hunger, violence, and general human misery in recent decades.
Yes, this. I would not argue that the book has no worth as a chilling dystopian narrative (I’m a big Atwood fan). It’s all the op-eds saying we’re already 99 percent of the way to Gilead that make me roll my eyes. (If they were instead talking about The Manchurian Candidate, I’d be more sympathetic.)
Skimming that thread, what I find the most surprising is the number of people saying “aaah, screw the human race”. :eek:
That’s quite the hyperbole as regards abortion. :rolleyes:
Right, but more to the point: where’s the list of “rights women used to have, that were subsequently taken away”?
This is an important point. Much more now than in the 1980s, most of the furthest right extremists tend toward hardcore libertarianism, not fascism. That doesn’t leave much fruitful ground for the Gilead scenario. Which is about the only good thing I can think to say about gun-nut libertarians, but there ya go.
There are a few states that might be pretty scary if they were allowed to pass any laws they wanted, with no check by the federal courts. Alabama is one of the most prominent among them, and you could also throw in other places like Oklahoma and Mississippi. But they are outliers, extreme cases.
I thought LeGuin herself was the Ursula K. LeGuin of SF.
Yes, great point. I reread the book recently, and they don’t even bother trying to change the proles’ lives much except to watch out for any that engage in political agitation and eliminate them. And the evolution of Outer Party members’ language to Newspeak is definitely in a fairly early stage.
One nod Atwood does make to continuity is a kind of wry remark about how even after everything, there’s still football on Sundays. (Gotta think life would be rather different for your average NFL player, though.)
I would agree there is. Especially when in the former case, your first wife is six years your junior, and your second wife is only another four years younger than that; whereas in the latter case, wife #2 is fourteen years younger than wife #1, and current wife #3 is another seven years younger than that.
No, he thought it had *already *happened, as it is clearly a story of the Russian Revolution and the seizure of power by Stalin.
I guess you also think National Book Award winner (and youngest ever presidential speechwriter) James Fallows is “durpy”?
I must have missed the part where the farm animals started talking in the Soviet Union which is embarrassing what with having a degree in Russian studies and all. It’s almost as if both Orwell and Atwood used allegory to make a political point. I think the fact that so many need to lash out at Atwood is because her writing touched a nerve and conservative America must put her in her place.
If you seriously don’t see that Napoleon clearly represents Stalin, I don’t know what else to say.
As for the rest, I’m not sure why you’re directing that at me. I’m a Democrat and a big fan of Atwood.
I wasn’t directing at you, sorry if I gave that impression and obviously Napoleon represents Stalin.
The point of my original reference to Animal Farm is that the OP seems to be looking for some exact historical parallel to Atwood’s work. I wanted to know why he was using that standard when there are other great political books like Animal Farm (and my favorite Heart of a Dog) that are more fantastic, but still cutting in their insight.
I find it telling that a woman writer taking on right wing politicized Christianity is held up for ridicule. She has to be mocked because her message is so subversive.
I’m not sure Margaret Atwood is being widely mocked. The question being asked in the thread is rather more specific than that, and in general I think it’s fair to say Atwood had been lionized for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which has sold a bazillion copies, won many awards, and in 32 years has never been out of print.
Well, I find 1984 EXTREMELY plausible also. Big Brother? Check. Ministry of Fake News? Check! “We have always been at war with Muslimia”? Check.
As for Animal Farm, I don’t believe that the animals will rise up, but the socialism-evolves-into-new-class-system: very plausible.
(PS, The library finally came through and delivered Harold Bergeron (or whatever it is called) to me, in a tome with 32 other dystopian short stories. I am all ready to get my despair on for the next couple of weeks! Whee.)
It’s not just plausible, it’s historical.
Atwood answering the questing during an interview on Q @ 17:28:
Heck, it’s not even clear that it happens in the book. Bear in mind that in the book, it’s clear Gilead is not the entire United States, but a part of it, and that there is ongoing warfare over parts of the USA.
I always imagined that the Republic of Gilead was in a perpetual state of civil war with the remnants of the US; it might not even control anything west of the Mississippi; let alone all the way to the Pacific coast. California in particular I imagine either as a fully independent nation or a radioactive wasteland. Nothing in between.
The precise scenario, probably not. Something similar or worse, I consider quite likely. I expect that racial purification will be at least as much a preoccupation as misogyny, for one. And I don’t think the theocrats would feel the need for a infertility plague to justify reducing women to breeding animals; that’s already what they think women are for.
Voter suppression means that authorities wanting to disregard the opinion of women just need to prevent women from being allowed to vote, or throw those votes out. If, for example it became common for polling places to be guarded by gangs of thugs loyal to the regime who would assault, rape or kill women who tried to vote, you wouldn’t see much of a women’s vote anymore even if it did remain *technically *legal.
And no, that’s not particularly unrealistic; similar things have been done to suppress black votes, and Trump as much as called for it during the election, aimed at brown people rather than women.
No one knew how difficult it was to prevent women and Hispanics from voting!
When did this juicy piece of evilry happen?
Having seen the first two in the miniseries, it plainly isn’t plausible; with the exception of the one most brutal person, the entire population appears to have dropped 60lbs.
Indeed. Fwiw, although using infertility as a devise isn’t new (although it may have been much newer in 1985) but I am finding the drama draws me in.
I trhink it’s critical to note that the events of the book/series don’t just spontaneously happen because of Der Trihs’s certainly the Republicans will just try to do it. They happen because suddenly there aren’t any babies anymore, or damn few.
How society would react to a sudden drop in fertility rates to “humans will become extict” levels is difficult to say, because one thing you CAN say is that it would result in sociological psychosis. Things absolutely would not just proceed as normal. The possibility of a religious zealotry taking over out of existential panic is quite plausible.
I heard Margaret Atwood interviewed on KCRW’s The Business, and it seems she came up with the “coda” for her book based on what I would consider an overly optimistic take on the Appendix of George Orwell’s 1984. Check out what she says about it at the 18:30 mark (spoilers for both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, obv.).
But maybe I’m wrong–maybe I’m the one who misunderstood Orwell’s intent. That sounds like a good topic for it’s own thread, actually…
OK, it took me a while to read this very short story, because I didn’t feel like dealing with fictional dystopia, given my current involvement in a very real one. But I read it and here are my pronouncements (includes spoilers)
[ol]
[li]Having about a hundred more amendments to the Constitution by 2080: Implausible/Laughable/Hilarious actually.[/li][li]People being deliberately handicapped to the lowest common denominator: Implausible/Laughable.[/li][li]Superior physical/mental humans becoming immune to the laws of gravity: Implausible/Laughable/Sad[/li][/ol]
It seems to me that this story says that the author found the Equal Rights Amendment objectionable.
Also: if “beautiful” people are always masked, how does anyone know what “beautiful” is?