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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.]
3 comments:
I agree the primary problem with morality plays like "The Handmaid’s Tale" is that it skips over subtly and jumps immediately to the worst case AND then applies that case as the end-result slippery slope if the slightly limitation of a woman's choice is suggested.
Trying to contrast fundamentalism that is willing to see individual women as incubators to the empty freedom of "hookup culture" holds something to consider. And even if the frame is honest, one unexpected truth of reality is that "freedom of choice" isn't any way to guarantee happiness, and in fact the opposite can be true the majority of the time.
The degeneracy of hookup culture would seem to show the failure of choice - where peer pressure can say your value is based on your popularity, which is a zero sum game to degrees, so the only serious choice for people with integrity is to walk away and refuse to play.
I imagine Atwood's book could have been more subtle oppression, more like 1984's dystopia (and its perfect nonpossessive hookup culture), where personal choices exists at every level, but the costs of stepping away from cultural rewards means most prefer to conform.
It's so wonderful to feel OPPRESSED. Especially when you aren't oppressed.
Atwood had lived in Afghanistan and said she got some of the ideas for the book from that experience.
It would have been nice if she had mentioned that in a foreword or an afterword. At least in the book I read, no such appeared.
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