Novels (or TV series) like this exaggerate; their stories should be interpreted as allegories.
Consider Orwell’s 1984. Eaxaggeration? Yes. But we are already in the era of doublethink, with White House aides proudly speaking about “Alternate Facts.”
Real dystopia arises much more insidiously than in Handmaid’s Tale. To say “No, our coming dystopia won’t go down exactly like that” is to miss the whole point of the allegory.
Novels (or TV series) like this exaggerate; their stories should be interpreted as allegories. To call them “silly” is to ignore the value and importance of such allegories.
Yes.
If the Trumpistas are taking us to a dystopia, I think it will be very different from the dystopia depicted in this TV series (which I’ve just started watching a few days ago). However, although those details are very different, the show highlights for me the dangers of America’s political degradation. How far are we, really, from lynchings of gays?
Yep, artificial insemination, IVF, and even any form of prenatal testing (like ultrasounds) are prohibited in Gilead for religious reasons. The regime would won’t even admit to the possibly of male sterility (at least openly, they conveniently allow Handmaids to have unchaperoned appointments with make physicians in rooms with locking doors).
Even if the fertility crisis isn’t just confined to North America the rest of the world seems to be doing a lot better than Gilead and I think at least part of that is a lack of ideological prohibitions on technological solutions. At the very least neither Canada or Mexico have stripped women of legal personhood. Yet at the same time Mexico is exploring buying Handmaids from Gilead, and it’s not hard to imagine how life could even worse for Handmaids in a society without Gilead’s borderline schizophrenic desire to put on pedestals while keeping them enslaved.
America is dominated* right now* by a political faction that hates women and elected a known sexual predator. Plenty of people find it very easy; and in a dictatorship those who disagree can just be killed.
If anything, such a dystopia could be significantly worse towards women than The Handmaid’s Tale.
I agree with the analysis that many people tend toward gloom and doom. The “wrong track” numbers in polls, for instance, are unmoored from realities about standard of living and crime. And how many people understand that we are living in a world with less violence, hunger, and extreme poverty than at any time in recorded history?
As **BPC **says, this is a strikingly odd example to offer. We are very far now. Are you quite young? Are you unaware of the huge shifts in polling about homosexuality in the past couple decades?
Classic “half empty” alarmism. What else is happening “right now”? Scads of prominent men who got away with predatory behavior for years are being outed, and fired. How does that fit into your narrative?
I have watched three episodes now, and I find myself able to suspend disbelief for the so-called present day of the show wherein society has already transformed. Then it’s like “Game of Thrones” in terms of a patriarchal society that operates as an alternate reality version of redeemable Europe. Not actually our world, but with some familiar parallels.
When they go back and show the coffee shop now has a male barista who calls two women customers sluts and tells them to leave, or when they are dismissed from their jobs, it just doesn’t work. The transition they are portraying does not ring true.
That was my point earlier in the thread - it just didn’t work because it went from “Life right now” to “American Taliban” far too quickly and unbelievably.
Marriage is a conservative value and gay rights benefit men, though of course not exclusively.
I think we descended into this quagmire of hatred and prejudice pretty quickly. People chanted “Jew get out” at campaign rallies for the man who elected, openly, on the news; people knew this.
You do grasp that there are women in the US now with no real access to reproductive control? Actually, or to reproductive health care. Today. Here, a supposed “first world” country.
Yes, people can turn toward hatred pretty quickly.
Totally. (BTW, I see from your quote that I was using voice to text and didn’t catch that it mistook “medieval” for “redeemable”.)
Chicken Littles like the one right between your post and mine look at Republican success in more thinly populated areas and translate that in their minds to a much more extreme ideology, and also imagine that it could take root in big cities like the one we saw the main character worked in. This kind of hysterical paranoia is equivalent to the people on the right who were willing to believe that Obama was preparing to round people up and make prison camps out of Walmarts so he could take away everyone’s guns and make them all gay or something.
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Sorry for the double post but I don’t see any way to edit in this Tapatalk app. I wanted to mention that I’ve heard quite a number of critics say that the flashback scenes were the most powerful to them, and I just cannot relate to that at all. These must be people psychologically prone to catastrophizinh about political events.
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I’m very late to the thread — I just watched Season 1 and started Season 2. I have a question:
The TV show seemingly depicts one “side” in America’s culture war in a very bad light. Has there been much backlash against the show from the religious right?
I haven’t seen the show, but in the book there was a terrible ecological catastrophe which caused, among other things, most women to become infertile. (Hence the handmaidens.) This created the atmosphere which allowed Gilead to seize power. Is this in the series? Because it isn’t like the relatively prosperous US suddenly changed.
There was no sign of that aspect in the series where I left off. Maybe they got to it later? All they established in the flashbacks I saw was that the Capitol got bombed by “terrorists” (it was implied that there was a false flag operation involved, like the German Reichstag in the 1930s), and the government was given broader powers…or maybe there was a coup? But the upshot seemed to be simply that the Christian Right took over the federal government, in conjunction with their misogynistic patriarchal ideology taking root among a seemingly larger portion of the population (especially the urban population) than holds those beliefs now.
A rapist is probably about to be put onto the supreme Court, for one.
We’ve passed the peak of civil rights, and are headed straight down into the abyss. *The Handmaid’s Tale *will likely to prove to be overly optimistic about the future, not pessimistic.
One presumes that the religious right has gotten used to being almost unanimously depicted in a negative way on television over the past several generations, and would have no reason to create a backlash against this show rather than countless other shows.
More Chicken Little talk. One of the most powerful media executives, Les Moonves, just got ousted for decades-old allegations from women. Within the past decade, gay marriage was legalized nationwide, as was openly serving while gay in the military. Trump tried to ban transgendered people from serving in the military, and his own generals refused to obey their commander-in-chief’s order.
Hardly anyone under 50 opposes gay rights, young urban women are out-earning their male peers, and older women marvel at how their coworkers who are under 35 or 40 simply refuse to take the harassment they considered par for the course in their own early careers.
Meanwhile, the percentage of people who go to church regularly is dwindling with each passing year.
Yet in the face of all this, extreme conservative religiosity is poised to make a roaring comeback and get women banned from working outside the home or even from having bank accounts? Or actually some unnamed scenario that’s much worse? Please. :dubious:
Yeah, me too. Having worked in Afghanistan, including living there for several years and having in-laws in Arkansas, I think that the Handmaid’s Tale is woefully naïve and Pollyannaish in what religious fanatics are capable of doing to women in the name of family values.
