The Handmaid's Tale is porn for women. Lit porn is what women use while men use imagistic porn. Women claim these are 'historical novels' or 'romance novels.' They are just porn novels.
My own "handmaiden" (mother of my five children, we are unmarried) found the book disturbing/resonant mostly by the cruelty of other women. The (weak) men in the story mostly just followed the resentment driven wishes of them.
Agreed. Don't worry about what she says on the surface, if you can encompass the kinkiness in it without disgust or addiction you win (at least some of) her loyalty.
I never read it but I do know about its main themes, having been around when it made a splash in the late 80s and disappeared (so we thought) into Women's Studies reading lists. (How wrong we were.)
But I always thought that the ritual fucking stuff was lame because even then there was artificial insemination, so why didn't she take that to the next level?
Now I know why. It was titillating. Lesson learned. I stupidly wrote a dystopian novel with some of the same themes and none of the porn.
I think the idea of not using artificial insemination is related to her view of religion. They’ve embraced a theocratic state, and may not be big on the whole science thing.
IIRC, the Handmaids were only for the rich & politically connected. There was also a subculture of working-class folk who were able to breed without the ceremony and who were despised and demeaned. (I haven’t read the book in years, so my memory may be faulty.) There was also a group of women called “Aunts” responsible for training the Handmaidens in correct behavior. The Aunts were older women, perhaps menopausal and too old to conceive.
Odd how none of these cosplayers see themselves as a breeder or an Aunt. /sarc
LOL I have read that three part series of 50 Shades of Grey though I never saw the movies of it. It's set in modern times which was back then around 2010 or so. A mysterious billionaire has a chance interview with the heroine, whose most redeeming qualities seem to be that she's still a virgin somehow despite our depraved hyper sexual culture and that she has no political identity or affiliations. He's fascinated by her as she reminds him of his drug addicted birth mother and his traumatic young life, which had led to his top secret hard core BDSM fetish as an adult. He wants her to sign a contract to be his six month bondage servant under some type of corporate secrecy agreement like all of his other sexual slaves had, but she's too old fashioned for that to really work. Kinky sex results, but always in the context of an actual monogamous relationship between the two of them. She breaks down Christian Grey's walls, she gets pregnant they get married and live happily ever after. There's some corporate sabotage and the bad guy knows about Christian Grey's dark early childhood past before he was adopted. There's one line thrown in by his adopted doctor mother regarding misguided parents who don't vaccinate their children. The entire book reinforces the idea that these billionaire executives are at their core just good guys who got into their position through hard work and maybe some boring ass mergers and acquisitions and stuff but nothing more sinister.
Something that I find fascinating there is that sexual purity is not a strong suit of the left....
Me too, Frank. All I wanted to be was a mother. The feminist screwed us all, women, men, and especially children. I’ve known this for 40 years. Not enough people have woken up yet, but I pray every day that they do.
There’s only one political party in the U.S. fanatically committed to normalizing a process in which marginalized women are impregnated with the sperm of a wealthy and powerful strange man, then legally obligated to carry the child to term, give birth to it, and then give it away forever to the wealthy man and his partner.
I get exactly what you are, saying Andy. I don’t even like when they call Animals “it” now that there is such perversion and confusion with the sexes. It’s just playing their game by calling living things “it” or one sex “them”
The government loves us to do that shit. I’d rather just say he or she. It’s worth it because babies and animals are not “ it.” a pervert on the other hand, I would call “it.”
“I saw that someone had left a baby behind the dumpster in the snow, so I picked it up and tried to warm it up. It had obviously been out there for a while because its cries were getting very hoarse. I rubbed its face and hands and put it inside my jacket while I looked for its mother.”
That’s a perfectly normal passage in English.
If you don’t know a baby’s sex, what do you do — strip off its diaper to inspect its genitals? You’re being an idiot and embarrassing yourself by denying that people routinely refer to babies as “it” when they don’t know its sex.
Interesting. Haven't read THT yet and don't intend to. But I've always been put off by the fan gurlz who have turned it into some kind of holy demonstration, usually used to attack men.
The concept of the book as described above reminds me of the Pussy Hat mass hysteria time. Trump made some kind of locker room comment, and the Pussy Hat gals hit the streets. I would be willing to bet that half the women wearing the pussy hat as part of that mob also helped make Fifty Shades of Grey a best-seller. Maybe they went out with their gal pals to see the Chippendales.
The world has been turned upside down. Titty bars for men have been eliminated or else forced underground. Or maybe they only exist now as lesbian clubs.
This is an interesting topic. I have two daughters and would feel bad for them losing the vote but on the other hand, it definitely altered our politics and not in a good way. If it was supposed to reduce the incidence of war, as I believe some suggested at the time, it failed in that regard. But since we can’t rerun history with different parameters, who knows what a world without a 19th amendment would have been like.
The Buddha said that women are deeply sexual in nature. Various traditions do various things about that, as Buddhism stretches from a closed Puritanism to a widely encompassing Tantra orientation. Islam also has a similar internal diversity in its history, yet throughout emphasises how important right relations between man and woman is, and how sex is a large part of that. The Torah too. Indigenous Australian gendered initiations into adulthood were all about this too.
Isn't it more based to see the patterns about kink etc in much of what women are interested in, and not just go beyond modern feminism, but also Enlightenment fantasies/wishes about mind and body/form being distinct? A man disgusted and appalled by women's (however denied) interest in both sex and social acceptability will never earn her deepest loyalty/never fully pass the shit test. If this becomes the normal response then culture will always be fractured.
I get that this is all from left field for most. If interested, check out Julius Evola's book on Eros.
It’s been a while since I read this but my take was that Ms Atwood picked two historical trends that were top-of-mind at the time (Cold War and the rise of Christian Fundamentalists) and extrapolated the curves into the future. Great idea, except they both subsided shortly afterwards.
It’s surprising, therefore, that the book has remained so relevant. Perhaps the man-hating aspects kept it fresh.
Christian fundamentalists were only on the rise in the 80s if your knowledge of American history and fundamentalism started in 1960. All but the most aggressive “fundamentalists” of the 1980s would have been thrown out of the most progressive church in the 1940s and would have been thrown out of the average church in the 1950s. Almost no woman had her head covered or was advocating for it in the 1980s, even the Catholics quit pushing it in 1983. Meanwhile if you had walked into a church without a hat or scarf in 1953 you would have been run out.
The Handmaid's Tale is porn for women. Lit porn is what women use while men use imagistic porn. Women claim these are 'historical novels' or 'romance novels.' They are just porn novels.
My own "handmaiden" (mother of my five children, we are unmarried) found the book disturbing/resonant mostly by the cruelty of other women. The (weak) men in the story mostly just followed the resentment driven wishes of them.
💯 and unfortunately, the man of the 80s failed.
I'm not very familiar with how the men of the 80s were. Can you say more?
Feminism is a giant shit test.
Agreed. Don't worry about what she says on the surface, if you can encompass the kinkiness in it without disgust or addiction you win (at least some of) her loyalty.
Blyat!
Kerpoof!
I never read it but I do know about its main themes, having been around when it made a splash in the late 80s and disappeared (so we thought) into Women's Studies reading lists. (How wrong we were.)
But I always thought that the ritual fucking stuff was lame because even then there was artificial insemination, so why didn't she take that to the next level?
Now I know why. It was titillating. Lesson learned. I stupidly wrote a dystopian novel with some of the same themes and none of the porn.
Ole Margaret was smarter than I thought.
I think the idea of not using artificial insemination is related to her view of religion. They’ve embraced a theocratic state, and may not be big on the whole science thing.
OK, but I don't find it very convincing in terms of dystopianism. How could you possibly ignore that? At least refer to it.
IIRC, the Handmaids were only for the rich & politically connected. There was also a subculture of working-class folk who were able to breed without the ceremony and who were despised and demeaned. (I haven’t read the book in years, so my memory may be faulty.) There was also a group of women called “Aunts” responsible for training the Handmaidens in correct behavior. The Aunts were older women, perhaps menopausal and too old to conceive.
Odd how none of these cosplayers see themselves as a breeder or an Aunt. /sarc
Compare and contrast with “50 shades of Gray”.
LOL I have read that three part series of 50 Shades of Grey though I never saw the movies of it. It's set in modern times which was back then around 2010 or so. A mysterious billionaire has a chance interview with the heroine, whose most redeeming qualities seem to be that she's still a virgin somehow despite our depraved hyper sexual culture and that she has no political identity or affiliations. He's fascinated by her as she reminds him of his drug addicted birth mother and his traumatic young life, which had led to his top secret hard core BDSM fetish as an adult. He wants her to sign a contract to be his six month bondage servant under some type of corporate secrecy agreement like all of his other sexual slaves had, but she's too old fashioned for that to really work. Kinky sex results, but always in the context of an actual monogamous relationship between the two of them. She breaks down Christian Grey's walls, she gets pregnant they get married and live happily ever after. There's some corporate sabotage and the bad guy knows about Christian Grey's dark early childhood past before he was adopted. There's one line thrown in by his adopted doctor mother regarding misguided parents who don't vaccinate their children. The entire book reinforces the idea that these billionaire executives are at their core just good guys who got into their position through hard work and maybe some boring ass mergers and acquisitions and stuff but nothing more sinister.
Something that I find fascinating there is that sexual purity is not a strong suit of the left....
Thank you for the post. The Handmaid's Tale is yet another aspect of the cancer that is feminism, in my humble opinion.
Me too, Frank. All I wanted to be was a mother. The feminist screwed us all, women, men, and especially children. I’ve known this for 40 years. Not enough people have woken up yet, but I pray every day that they do.
There’s only one political party in the U.S. fanatically committed to normalizing a process in which marginalized women are impregnated with the sperm of a wealthy and powerful strange man, then legally obligated to carry the child to term, give birth to it, and then give it away forever to the wealthy man and his partner.
“it”
People routinely refer to a baby of uncertain sex as “it”.
I get exactly what you are, saying Andy. I don’t even like when they call Animals “it” now that there is such perversion and confusion with the sexes. It’s just playing their game by calling living things “it” or one sex “them”
The government loves us to do that shit. I’d rather just say he or she. It’s worth it because babies and animals are not “ it.” a pervert on the other hand, I would call “it.”
“I saw that someone had left a baby behind the dumpster in the snow, so I picked it up and tried to warm it up. It had obviously been out there for a while because its cries were getting very hoarse. I rubbed its face and hands and put it inside my jacket while I looked for its mother.”
That’s a perfectly normal passage in English.
If you don’t know a baby’s sex, what do you do — strip off its diaper to inspect its genitals? You’re being an idiot and embarrassing yourself by denying that people routinely refer to babies as “it” when they don’t know its sex.
Interesting. Haven't read THT yet and don't intend to. But I've always been put off by the fan gurlz who have turned it into some kind of holy demonstration, usually used to attack men.
The concept of the book as described above reminds me of the Pussy Hat mass hysteria time. Trump made some kind of locker room comment, and the Pussy Hat gals hit the streets. I would be willing to bet that half the women wearing the pussy hat as part of that mob also helped make Fifty Shades of Grey a best-seller. Maybe they went out with their gal pals to see the Chippendales.
The world has been turned upside down. Titty bars for men have been eliminated or else forced underground. Or maybe they only exist now as lesbian clubs.
Good article, Andy!
And the idiots are still wearing white because 120 years ago they couldn’t vote
I think the 19th amendment should be repealed ASAP actually if they want to bring it up so much
This is an interesting topic. I have two daughters and would feel bad for them losing the vote but on the other hand, it definitely altered our politics and not in a good way. If it was supposed to reduce the incidence of war, as I believe some suggested at the time, it failed in that regard. But since we can’t rerun history with different parameters, who knows what a world without a 19th amendment would have been like.
About time someone turned that meme into a full article.
She once put on cannabilistic puppet shows. She's a vegetarian.
It is VERY poorly written.
I disagree. It’s a page-turner dystopian sci fi novel. For what it is, it’s perfectly good. It’s just not Great Literature.
You are entitled to your opinion.
Would you say it's a Bodice Ripper LARPing as a political screed?
Never read it, am glad I did not waste my time…
Lots of leftists were fans. Never had interest myself
Peace,
Cool article.
The Buddha said that women are deeply sexual in nature. Various traditions do various things about that, as Buddhism stretches from a closed Puritanism to a widely encompassing Tantra orientation. Islam also has a similar internal diversity in its history, yet throughout emphasises how important right relations between man and woman is, and how sex is a large part of that. The Torah too. Indigenous Australian gendered initiations into adulthood were all about this too.
Isn't it more based to see the patterns about kink etc in much of what women are interested in, and not just go beyond modern feminism, but also Enlightenment fantasies/wishes about mind and body/form being distinct? A man disgusted and appalled by women's (however denied) interest in both sex and social acceptability will never earn her deepest loyalty/never fully pass the shit test. If this becomes the normal response then culture will always be fractured.
I get that this is all from left field for most. If interested, check out Julius Evola's book on Eros.
Peace.
It’s been a while since I read this but my take was that Ms Atwood picked two historical trends that were top-of-mind at the time (Cold War and the rise of Christian Fundamentalists) and extrapolated the curves into the future. Great idea, except they both subsided shortly afterwards.
It’s surprising, therefore, that the book has remained so relevant. Perhaps the man-hating aspects kept it fresh.
Christian fundamentalists were only on the rise in the 80s if your knowledge of American history and fundamentalism started in 1960. All but the most aggressive “fundamentalists” of the 1980s would have been thrown out of the most progressive church in the 1940s and would have been thrown out of the average church in the 1950s. Almost no woman had her head covered or was advocating for it in the 1980s, even the Catholics quit pushing it in 1983. Meanwhile if you had walked into a church without a hat or scarf in 1953 you would have been run out.