Not Free to Choose

One has refrained from commenting on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale. To comment fairly one would have to read it, and one does not have that much time to waste. One understands that the story has been widely praised by feminists. One knows that Hulu has produced a television show about it, starring culture heroine and noted Scientologist, Elizabeth Moss.

One has also resisted the lure of the handmaid’s tale because it feels like theatre of the absurd. Roughly equivalent to Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, but lacking in artistry. After all, when you are offering mindless propaganda wrapped in paranoid thinking, you do not deserve to be read.

Given that I have not read the book or seen the television show, I rely on Rich Lowry’s summary:

Based on the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, the series depicts a misogynist dystopia. Christian fundamentalists have established a theocracy that — after an environmental debacle craters the birth rate — forces fertile women, called handmaids, into sexual slavery. 

Is this remotely plausible to any but the most fevered paranoid thinkers? Since the Anglo-American world has actually led the world on women’s issues, it makes no sense to say that American is going to become the dystopia that Atwood conjures in her book.

This is not to say that such a world cannot exist? It does exist, Lowry notes, but not in the Christian world:

Fair enough. The Handmaid’s Tale does have something to tell us about, say, Saudi Arabia. But, in an uncomfortable fact for Christian-fearing feminists, none of the world’s women-hating theocracies are Christian.

But, why are feminists thrilling to the Atwood message? Easy… they have equated the prospect of turning women into human incubators to… you guessed it… defunding Planned Parenthood and undoing the Obamacare contraception mandate:

What this means is that Republicans want to defund the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and roll back Obamacare’s contraception mandate. If they succeed, this would mean less government intervention in matters of sexual morality, rather than more. The progressive mind is unable to process that it has won the culture war in a rout (except for abortion, where conservatives are trying to chip away at our extremely liberal laws at the margins). We live in a country where Christian bakers get harried by government for politely declining to bake cakes for gay weddings, yet progressives still believe we are a few steps away from enslaving women.

Lowry continues:

The progressive mind is unable to process that it has won the culture war in a rout (except for abortion, where conservatives are trying to chip away at our extremely liberal laws at the margins). We live in a country where Christian bakers get harried by government for politely declining to bake cakes for gay weddings, yet progressives still believe we are a few steps away from enslaving women.

Free to choose… free to choose… Great God almighty we’re free to choose.

But, don’t be so quick to draw a conclusion. There's method behind the delusion. Feminists love Atwood’s story because it allows them to ignore the damage that feminism itself has done to women’s reproductive choices.

In the  world that feminists created more and more women are not free to choose. Women who followed the feminist life plan have often found themselves unable to conceive. Because, biology is not a social construct. Obviously, feminism has been a boon for reproductive endocrinologists, but for many women, even modern medicine cannot undo the damage.

Since feminism instructs women to avoid pregnancy or childbearing until their careers are well established, a considerable number of women who would have wanted to have children have discovered that biology has taken away their freedom to choose to have a child. Is this not worth noting?

And let’s not forget that other great feminist accomplishment: the hookup culture. Somehow or other feminists convinced women that engaging in random sexual acts with semi-anonymous men was liberating. Anything, but not pregnancy....

Tufts professor Nancy Bauer pictured modern liberated women matching men shot for shot—the equal shot principle—and then dropping to their knees to service them. At the least, fellatio is foolproof contraception. 

As for the nation’s STD rates, we shall leave that for another day.

[Addendum: See also the reflections of Mallory (sister of Kate) Millett, in Frontpage Magazine.]