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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30114 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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In the end, doesn't it come to "the ruling party is united enough behind the desire to change the laws and the Constitution that they just do it"?

No.

What would stop them?

A whole shitload of precedent and existing laws.

To somehow morph the constitution enough that individual lights could be altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions, you'd have to, at the very least, pass a bunch of amendments. Not laws, amendments. This requires ratification by 2/3rds of the states. I don't think there's anything, right now or in the foreseeable future, that 2/3rds of the states could agree on fast enough to accomplish this within a 4 - 8 year presidency and also assume zero turnover in congress. Along the way, I also assume there would be dozens of court challenges.

Remember that, for a few years, the Republicans really mad an effort to overturn The Affordable Care Act. They got close but failed. The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.

Altering the constitution (in the opposite direction of its original intent) would require an amazing level of sustained, focused, hyper coordinated action. Without any room for even mild electoral losses or turnover. While also assuming something like court packing happening in parallel. And ... in a single 4 year Trump admin?

It's a goofy catastrophy-porn scenario. Congress is fucking up its basic budgetary requirements. The Republican majority kicked out their own speaker. But, we're supposedly to believe that if Orange Man gets a sequel (which will almost certainly be decided by less than 300k votes) all of a sudden 2/3rds of the states and 3/4ths of their population will get out their well concealed ChristoFascist playbooks and get to work.

The ACA is now ingrained enough in the American public that no Republican is making that the center of their campaign, even if they are nominally still in favor of overturning it.

Well, that was the assumption about Roe, too. And look what happened there.

I think that's in an inaccurate comparison on two levels.

  1. The ACA fundamentally gives people a direct financial benefit. Reference Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security - and their proportion of the budget each year - and its self-evident that direct cash / benefit programs are the stickiest in the American voting public. Roe guaranteed a right which, as personal as it was, is still ephemeral. A "right" doesn't show up in my checking account each month (or, in the case of healthcare benefits, prevent by checking account from going down each month).

  2. Roe V Wade triggered a multi-decade long popular counter-movement to its passage at the Federal, State, and Local levels that self-sustained and routinely co-opted politicians to support it. Where are the local anti-ACA chapters? The real interest in repealing the ACA is pretty much, at this point, the passion project of a few truly committed think tankers, lobbyists, and maybe a half-handful of Congressmen.

All that being said, I actually do hold out long term hope that the ACA will be overturned or sufficiently neutered on the grounds that, eventually, the cost will be plainly identified as major drag on all economic growth. I think this will happen when we get to deep boomer aging, where the Median boomer is now in that lifespan where they required constant and pricey medical care and/or assisted living. Combined with social security going bankrupt within the next 10 years, this will create such a stark revelation of "the old and dying stealing everything from the younger generations" that Congress (at that point rid of boomers almost by definition) will have to act.

Heh, I just wrote, "Congress will have to act." Maybe I am the asshole.

altered to the point Handmaid's Tale conditions

I never watched (or read) it and only know it through cultural osmosis, but why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?

What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/464243-photographer-defends-wedding-photo-with-handmaids-tale-theme/

I mean, we have real misogynistic dystopia at home! (Or rather abroad)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68634700

It’s easy to forget that when the large majority of men suck, the large majority of women are unhappy. If you think it’s tough being a shitty loser man in a low-sex marriage, imagine being his wife and having to fuck him every month. Having to muster up the willpower to, essentially, let a man that you don’t want to fuck – that every fiber in your body is screaming at you to run away from – rape you, because you don’t want to break apart your family or lose your stability.

Many wives and girlfriends, simply put, do not want to fuck their loser men. But the alternative is worse. Breaking families apart, losing financial stability and all of the labor their men provide, turning their lives upside down – these women essentially feel like their lives are being held at gunpoint. They don’t want to have sex, but the men in their lives have power over them, and because these men have power over them, they allow these men to rape them. They don’t love their men – at least not in a sexual way – and are simply allowing themselves to be used for sexual release by someone who has power over them.

Women who are married to or involved with loser men feel like handmaids, from the TV show. No respect, no love, just monthly rapes because the alternative is worse. And this is why The Handmaids Tale speaks to so many women.

Like most fictional novels, The Handmaid’s Tale caters to its audience. Not too long into the book, the evil oppressor man who owns the female protagonist starts to become interested in her for more than just her handmaid duties. And, of course, there’s another man that she eagerly wants to fuck in between forced fuckings, who loves her back because, as we all know from Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and other such books, men always fall left and right an average woman for absolutely no reason whatsoever simply because there’s something so darn indescribably special about her. The book quickly turns from its dystopian commentary about America’s dark future into a tale of this woman’s hopes, dreams, and attempts to escape to a better life with a better man – directly speaking to its target audience of unhappy wives.

Remember, the majority of men are losers. Well, not really. They’re average guys. But in the eyes of women, that makes them losers. Most women are not happy with most men. They’re just whoring themselves out for money, labor, and stability. Meanwhile, they dream of an escape to a better life with a better man. And over time, these feelings take a toll. The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to modern women because modern women literally feel oppressed by their men. On some level, deep down inside, they feel powerless, used, and raped by the men who love them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/6dyf0y/why_women_are_so_entranced_by_the_handmaids_tale/

Umm, if the women who watch the handmaid's tale find themselves identifying with the protagonist as an unloved sexual object, then perhaps it's not because they hate their husbands. Perhaps it's situationships, hookups, and casual dating- after all, the handmaid's tale's audience is pretty hardcore liberal/progressive and likely more onboard with such things, and women seem to dislike actually being in them even if they won't demand commitment before sex.

situationships, hookups, and casual dating

But those, as far as I know, aren't present in the novel/series at all, so the latter won't have a message that resonates with women who feel wronged by bad hookups/one-night stands/dates/flings.

Sex without love or commitment by men who treat the protagonist as property, however, is.

"Marriage is just a prostitution-exclusivity agreement that costs a lot" is a line I don't see used much despite its trivial truth for most relationships, probably because the higher-quality people tend to end up in marriages that claim doesn't hold for.

The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to modern women

It appeals to Boomers and their children that uncritically parrot all of their grievances (and because "literally feeling oppressed" is both a fetish and a worldview that scores you political points). Meanwhile, modern women just don't get married since they're stable all by themselves (though their parents' policies have put this in jeopardy, that also applies to the men); if you're going to sell your body corporate pays better than domestic to the point that the two-income trap that tends to create puts women who aren't so modern in a disadvantageous position.

The book [is the standard pornography women consume with grimdark elements]

So basically, it's 177013 for women.

Hat tip for the hentai reference! The crucial difference in terms of social context, of course, is that 177013 never got the benefit of having a 5-season TV series with full normie appeal getting based on it. This is the reality of current society.

Man, that post is a blackpilled take completely divorced from reality.

Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published. Sure, very few women have ever actually read it, but even fewer men have - that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)

It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha. Horseshoe theory strikes again, I guess. Something something Hlynka?

The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives. But the tonal and thematic differences between stories like 50 Shades (or John Norman's Gor series, which has some female fans as well though it's mostly aimed at men) and The Handmaid's Tale are pretty dramatic. I haven't seen the TV show, but no part of the book makes it sexy or appealing even to men who like the idea of dominating women or women who like the idea of a domineering man. The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists. I can't say I can speak for Afghani women but let's say I have grave doubts about Dread Jim's belief that those women and ISIS brides are actually living in sexually satisfied bliss being literally owned by men who treat them as chattel. The women who are really into Christian Gray imagine a billionaire giving them his undivided attention and care - the point of the fantasy is that even if he's rough and controlling, he only has eyes for plain little ol' her, and they have super-hot sex, but then she's allowed to continue living her life as the cherished object of a rich man who's actually devoted to her happiness, not a religious fanatic who will beat her if she lets another man see her elbow.

Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale was not "unknown" to Western women until the TV series. It's been a very well known book since it was first published.

Well, I'm not a Westerner, so I'm not really qualified to comment on that. The OP claims "it's a popular book in hardcore womens' studies programs, but not too well-known elsewhere". The "hardcore" part is maybe unwarranted if I want to be completely fair, but otherwise I find the assessment correct. Maybe I should make the nuanced argument that it was relatively well-known among suburban middle-class Blue Tribe women / wine moms / soccer moms and generally women that are exposed to feminist doctrine.

that line about how women "don’t give a flying fuck about books or literary concepts unless they see them on a screen" is doubly true of men. Seriously, it is a statistical fact that women read and buy more books than men. (Yes, the majority of books bought are romances, but even in other genres, except perhaps SF and non-fiction, women are bigger readers than men.)

Well, I guess you're right, but that probably has a lot to do with recent cultural trends of SF, YA, fan fiction and similar literary genres being increasingly captured by feminists.

It's weird seeing this poster take the old radfem line that all sex in a patriarchy is rape and women only pretend to love their men, and switch it around to say this is essentially true but it's because all women lust to be owned by an alpha.

I'd say he argues that it's essentially true because feminist doctrine has become wholly normalized among Blue Tribe middle-class suburban women.

No, The Handmaid's Tale used to be famous mostly for being a work of dystopian fiction. Its feminist themes were quite obvious, but it wasn't just wine moms and women's studies majors reading it. I know a lot of other SF fans who did, for example.

Margaret Atwood has been a big literary name for years. She's written a lot of other well known books (and used to be known for writing sci-fi dystopias while sort of disdainfully avoiding the "science fiction" label).

I don't think you accurately capture the argument about why incels and manosphere activists believe the same thing radical feminists do (essentially, that the sexes hate each other and we can't really be happy with each other without reordering society in some way - both sides essentially arguing "the opposite sex must be put under our boot").

Fair points, although I wonder just how large the overlap is between "women who read SF" and "current/future feminists".

Most women who read SF are probably feminists, but I don't think most feminists are SF fans. Indeed, SF used to be more of a male genre (and much of the culture war in SF fandom is over women "taking over" science fiction and shifting it more towards YA-ish fantasy/romances).

It's a well known in certain circles finding that happiness, for American women, is correlated with traditional style marriages in a religious context. I'd like to see if the same finding holds true in Turkey, Iran, etc. In other words, Islamic marriages which are more contractual and put women on a lower level compared to men.

For most people here, "traditional style" marriage means something like "Husband is the head of household and primary breadwinner, wife takes care of the house and children, wife defers to husband in most matters but still has a voice and expects her needs and desires to be taken seriously, and should not be abused or cheated on."

People who think "traditional style" marriage means the husband is lord and master, does whatever he pleases, and she will shut up and take it because that is her role, are not describing real traditions, though they may be describing certain subcultures. The average Muslim woman certainly doesn't consider that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be like.

People who think "traditional style" marriage means the husband is lord and master, does whatever he pleases, and she will shut up and take it because that is her role, are not describing real traditions, though they may be describing certain subcultures

Yeah, I think that's just called being selfish. And I think it's important to notice how selfishness manifests itself in both genders (which tends to be 'only my contribution matters' for men and 'your contribution will never be good enough' for women), and how certain traits of biological reality tend to enable/excuse this selfishness even in people who should intrinsically know better (see honey, it's in the law, that means I have an excuse... and anything can be used as an excuse).

The average Muslim woman certainly doesn't consider that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be like.

But it is what an average Western man or woman considers that to be what an Islamic marriage is supposed to be.

Perhaps pornography doesn't actually provide a realistic or positive view of culture or relationships? Big if true.

Well yes, ISIS and the Taliban are likely deviations from ultrafundamentalist Islam(in which a man may beat his wife four times before being required to divorce her- rather similar to the rarest of rare criteria held to in Christendom before the enlightenment when you think about it). But Islamic fundamentalists do observably tend to treat their women worse than Christian fundamentalists, and the difference is old- we know women were more liberated under Christianity than under Islam starting at some point in the middle ages.

I'm just pointing out, because it is mentioned so often by people who seem to think "Islamic culture" = "women are treated as chattel/sex slaves" ("and this is how all traditional societies were!") that most modern Muslim societies aren't actually like that (and even in ancient times the "model" Islamic marriage was not supposed to be like that). Muslims are very conservative and trad compared to the West, yes. But Dread Jim/KulakRevolt's Bronze Age fantasies are just that.

I don’t think Jim and Kulak actually know what patriarchy is- it’s rule by, specifically, fathers, and that means the high-vitality young men BAP and Kulak idolize are on a short leash and don’t get to do what they want within the community. Patriarchal societies, again and again, tend to create structures to protect women from those young men, because patriarchs care about their daughters even if they don’t regard them as needing independence. Actual historical patriarchy is as much rule by the old as it is by men.

I think Kulak and Jim are taking feminist fan fiction of an actual anthropological phenomenon(where older men tend to hold social power) at face value. Rather ironic for such red pilled spicy take generators.

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The appeal of 50 Shades of Grey and similar stories is that yeah, a lot of women really do get turned on by the idea of being dominated, and some part of them wants a 6/6/6 alpha the same way some part of most men want a barely-legal bikini model, even if they love their wives.

It is important to note that the female fantasy is to replace their husband with the 6/6/6 alpha, while the male fantasy is to add the barely-legal bikini model to a harem with their wives. Men are polygamous, women are serially monogamous, because a woman can only be pregnant by one man at a time, while a man can get multiple women pregnant at the same time.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

why you think so?

If you're a guy who got dumped for a 6/6/6, you're now unmarried and free to look for another wife. If you're a wife who got sidelined for a bikini model, you're still married but receive only half (likely much less) of the commitment, and there's now one less woman for the rest of the men in society, statistically leaving one man completely without a match. It does look like the man's fantasy as you described it is the evil one.

What makes wanting an attractive and successful husband evil?

That part is normal and (according to the red-or-darker-pill view being expressed here) even biologically imperative. Presumably the evil part is the part where (again, according to that specific view) they're prepared to dump their existing husbands on a dime for him.

I don't think I'm anywhere near to fully agreeing with this, but I have seen a lot of media geared to women that treats female cheating very casually or sometimes even as virtuous, while this is rarely the case for male cheating in media aimed at men, and it's bothered me before.

Also, when women practice promiscuity, they prefer to do it in the form of serial monogamy / branch-swinging. In men's case, it's plate-spinning / soft harems. I don't think I need to describe how society treats these behaviors vastly differently.

while this is rarely the case for male cheating in media aimed at men

I definitely seen this glorified in many cases in media aimed at men (and not only in blatant porn or things pretending to not be a porn)

Pretty much no woman who is already married with children (having entered the marriage childless) is going to be able to ‘date up’ after divorce unless she picked a truly terrible husband. At best she’ll date sideways, most likely down.

Perfectly true, but media aimed at women such Eat, Pray, Love continues to sell them the fantasy that they will do better after a divorce, lots of women believe it, and destroy their husband's lives, their children's lives, and their own lives chasing Chad, not realizing that if Chad didn't want to settle down with them when they were young and childness, he definitely is not going to want to settle down with them now that they are old single mothers.

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I think that media is specifically geared towards the bottom of the barrel women who are already engaging in terrible or trashy behavior.

Women's sexual desires are fundamentally evil in a way that men's sexual preferences aren't.

That's, uh, quite a take.

You know, I have said this before and I'll say it again: evolutionary psychology has a lot of explanatory power, but humans are not hardwired circuits of evolutionary psychology. We are not spermatazoa and eggs being inexorably guided towards union in our every thought and action by chthonic reproductive forces. (And if we were - if what women do is just their evolved natures - then how is it "evil"?) At the very least, you must acknowledge we all live on various bell curves, in which some of us adhere to the "modal male/modal female" behavior more than others.

Detached from evpsych "Why women are evil hypergamous whores" arguments, I think the moral claim that it's "more evil" to want to replace your spouse with a hotter spouse than to want to make your spouse part of a harem is pretty weak. Why should a man find it more objectionable that his wife harbors desires to fuck another man instead of him than a woman should find it objectionable that her husband harbors desires to fuck other women in addition to her?

I have the intuition that adding a relationship is less bad than replacing a relationship. Like, if a married couple that already has a child decides to have a second child, or if a person who only has one friend one day manages to get another friend, that's a perfectly normal and positive development. Whereas if a couple has a second child and then throws out their first child into the streets because the second child is taller and stronger and smarter and they have decided that they want to invest all of their resources into one child, that would be evil.

Likewise, the desire of men to add a second woman to their marriage seems to me a lot more honest and healthy than that thing women do where they swear they will love you forever only to turn around and act like you never existed the second a better option comes long.

I think I would have preferred being the senior member of a harem to that.

I have the intuition that adding a relationship is less bad than replacing a relationship.

In a polygamous society you could call adding a wife "adding a relationship," I guess, but in our culture we don't see it that way and it's just cheating. Not at all the same thing as adding another child.

Likewise, the desire of men to add a second woman to their marriage seems to me a lot more honest and healthy than that thing women do where they swear they will love you forever only to turn around and act like you never existed the second a better option comes long.

Damn, dude, find you some better women. I mean, if you sincerely believe that "that thing women do" is just something that is natural to all women (AWALT), why do you even want to have a "relationship" at all?

You do know that men also have been known to profess eternal love for a woman only to dump her for a younger, hotter model, right?

I think I would have preferred being the senior member of a harem to that.

I doubt you would, actually, and certainly you wouldn't prefer being a junior member of a harem.

I doubt you would, actually, and certainly you wouldn't prefer being a junior member of a harem.

Ergw strikes me as having a bit too much pride to agree to be one of these guys, but if the only alternative to such relationship is separation, a person who is sufficiently in love and scared of being alone would put on the horns.

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The sex is constantly depicted as gross and degrading, they are all living in literal dystopian conditions (impoverished, deprived of basic necessities), and Atwood famously was inspired more by the Taliban than by Christian Dominionists.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.

Neverthless, it's true that Atwood's book never makes the sex seem appealing at all, and there's only a couple of instances of "sex scenes", if you can call them that. I haven't seen the show, either, but all the publicity makes it seem rather more culture-warrish than the book which, if I remember correctly, only contains one line about abortion (offhand remark by Offred that she can't even remember why everyone cared about legal abortion so much since in the book's present-day society everyone wants, more than anything, to be fertile) and scarcely more than that about gays or lesbians. It's really more of a personalized "what would I do if enslaved by a tyrannical society" thing than about the exact details of the society itself.

Atwood seems to have leaned into the narrative about it being modern-day anti-GOP commentary in recent interviews, but then again, she has just received quite a bit more of publicity than she had before and that sort of a thing creates an easy need to cater to your new audiences.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, if I remember correctly. It was written in 1985 and Taliban didn't exist yet.

You're right, my bad (memory).

I am not surprised that Atwood today is more willing to have it read as an allegory about the Republican Right, but at least when I read it in the 80s, it was more nuanced and less overtly contemporary culture war.

It’s effective because it’s pretty realistic. And by “realistic” I mean it’s basically what already happened in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran in the 80s with the serial numbers filled off. Margaret Atwood used to explicitly say this, but she’s gradually memory-holed that in favor of the book being a metaphor for the dark days of Ronald Reagan’s America. It’s a way for liberal women to freak out about the rollback of women’s rights in the global south, and fear that it could happen here too, without saying any politically incorrect things about politically protected groups.

The plain truth of the matter is that women's liberation as a concept was never politically normalized in any of those countries at any point of their history except for a rather small elite in the capital. There was no progress for the fundamentalists to roll back, realistically speaking.

But, how exactly? I don’t see how “Afghanistani social norms suddenly get transposed onto the USA” makes for a more realistic horror than most other horror stories available. In fact, the scenario as written is completely uncoupled from the reality of life in the USA. As pointed out in the Exiled article, the horror of most Americans is not “too much religion” controlling people, but the realities of corporate America. Which is to say that Corporate runs American culture and life to such a degree that most families are forced to kennel any kids they actually have within 8 weeks of having them so they can go back to being a duel income family and seeing the baby after 6pm on weekdays (until bedtime) and weekends. And the horror of living in decaying cities where you can get jumped by thugs but can’t protect yourself from them.

Except the handmaid's tale might be closer to what goes on in Islamic societies than it is to a hypothetical patriarchal Christian theocracy in the modern west, but it's still not particularly close. The only similarity is women not having rights.

The problem being that women “having rights” is really a subset of corporate control over America. What the rights mean, effectively is that women want to be free to work and have careers and be good little consume-product-bots. Freedom in the modern world is more of a brand than anything else. You’re free to choose what sectors of the economic engine you want to be a battery for, and which consumer demographics you want to buy the imagery of. But beyond that, we’re pretty constrained as more and more of the decisions we used to be able to make are things you can get unjobbed for saying where the wrong people can hear you, and your daily tasks are set by people in offices a thousand miles away. And your free time is spent watching whatever entertainment LA thinks is cool and of course must espouse Goodthink. Which is exactly why I think the fears of Christian Nationalism are not realistic— it would cost the economy too much money, and too many potential wage-slaves to have half of the American population shoved into kitchens to cook and clean. It would half the disposable income per household and thus fewer bobbles sold, less wine, fewer meals out.

I think the “fear” feels a bit like the wrangling over 50 Shades of Grey also seen at the time as a terrible misogynist novel in which women were shown the dark side of S&M and date rape. Except the main audience of the book was women who just couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Not because they were afraid of it or repulsed by it. It was because they wanted a man to make them feel like Grey made his woman feel. I get the same vibe from Handmaid. They want some outside events to force them to stop working their stressful job for a boss they hate while their baby hits all their milestones at daycare. They want a world where all they have to worry about is cooking and cleaning and hugging their babies. But since they aren’t supposed to want that it’s sublimated as horror. Wouldn’t it be horrible if they were forced into living like a tradwife? Don’t you know that Trump wants to do that?

From the excellent http://exiledonline.com/old-exile/vault/books/review103.html

Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive. Handmaid’s Tale is fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives. No one wants to force middle-class American women to have babies. In fact, it’s almost impossible for them to contemplate having kids, because they’re terrified that it might set them back in their careers, and their rivals in the adjacent cubicles would grab their parking spaces and health plans. Nobody wants to use their bodies. That’s precisely the horror with which they live: no one wants to mate with them because in their world, every single striver must fear every other, and the sort of joint action involved in mating and rearing one’s young is impossible—laughable, a thing which only those who have abandoned the hope of A Career can contemplate. So in their minds, mating and rearing children moves down in class, becoming a thing for rednecks and (though they’ll never say this part out loud) immigrants-of-color. The desire to have children gets bounced outside oneself, onto these lesser beings, and returns, courtesy of Atwood, in demonized form, as the tyranny of procreation, family values and the Patriarchy. It’s the horror they love to fear.

Thanks for confirming that the old Exile archives are indeed freely available online, at least in part. The observations in this article are even more striking when you consider that Dolan is pretty much an average economic leftist and feminist, as far as I can tell.

I've heard it said that Atwood intended the original novel as a satire on Iran, as a sort of "imagine if this happened here" sort of scenario - an interpretation that the TV show largely ignores, as I understand it.

I never watched (or read) it and only know it through cultural osmosis, but why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?

Because progressives fail the ideological turing test. They don't know what real life western patriarchalists think, believe, and advocate. The handmaid's tale is current thing horror porn, so it gets the nod.

Isn’t it more female sexual fetish and fear? Rich man can’t help himself but want the young fertile woman and takes her. And the flip side is the partner who is aging but can’t compete with the young fertile woman.

It taps into both female desires and fears.

I don't think that's it because 'super powerful rich dude just has to have the protagonist and won't let things like morals/respect for individual rights/her lack of interest get in the way' is already a romance genre and it doesn't seem much like the handmaid's tale.

I'm pretty skeptical.

There's definitely women with the general kink of being 'taken' (or assigned) by someone with near-ultimate power -- if you're a sub, there's a lot to like in a fantasy of being desired this sort of nonspecific way, where you're responsible for doing things but not making decisions, with clear and immediate and recoverable punishments for failure.

((Hell, there's guys with that kink, either in the 'oh do I want to be part of a harem servicing the guy/girl who will take up my control', or the rarer and more anatomically-implausible variants. For those interested in the former and not averse to m/m stuff, tatsuchan18's S4S series is a good, if sparkledoggy, glimpse for what subs are looking for.))

But it doesn't look anything like Handmaid's Tale, either the film or story version. Virtually no one in Handmaid's Tale is actually horny; 'legitimate' sex here is about power, most explicitly with the monthly 'duties'. The closest description to sexual enjoyment the books provide is one Wife who got more pleasure from holding her husband's handmaid down, and a brothel that ends up being much more for the one-pump-chumps than any serious desire or demand. The handmaids aren't even trophy wives. Rather than rules being consistent and the penalties being capricious(ly enjoyable), the rules are capricious while the penalties are permanent and ironclad.

It's horror porn. Atwood literally threw every misogynistic law or social norm that she had ever heard a rumor about into a jar, shook the jar a bunch, and wrote what came out. It's incoherent as such, even compared to a lot of the slave harem porn fantasies, but any intent for the work to be speculative fiction was stapled on at the end.

It's basically an erotic rape fantasy. Mocked by this meme: https://imgur.com/a/EGjKmW8

It was most likely inspired by Margaret Atwood hearing about how in the 70s places like Beirut and Damascus went from being popular gay vacation spots to having all women covered.

Of course the blue tribe women watching it couldn't admit either of those things. So they claimed it was a profound warning about Trump.

in the 70s places like Beirut and Damascus went from being popular gay vacation spots to having all women covered.

That all seems rather far-fetched.

There's a tendency to overstate the matter -- while parts of the Ottoman Empire largely ignored male homosexual behavior, much of the post-Ottoman Empire turned religious bans on homosexual acts into civil law ones, either under local pressures or Western ones; there were complex social and sometimes legal norms against 'effeminacy' that weren't quite a ban on gay stuff but sometimes got used that way; a lot of this is graded on a pretty heavy curve given explicit and enforced bans in Western countries in the 1950-1960s -- but they definitely had a dedicated western European fandom even into 1972-1973.

((Uh, not always in good ways. A lot of the western gay tourist culture used 'boy' in the sense of 'adult twink', and a number didn't.))

The various civil wars were a good part of it, various migrations (both in response to Israel and to refugee flight) another part, increasing Islamist fear/demonization of 'Westernized' culture yet another, both in relationship to homosexuality and for treatment of women.

It is fascinating to me that the same people who worry about Trump creating the Handmaid’s tale are the same people who support immigration from MENA

why it is such a strong symbol for western misogynistic dystopia?

Because right around the time Trump got elected, they came out with a show and it caught on with blue tribe women. That's really it. I think if the show didn't exist you wouldn't hear so many of those comparisons.

I have a hard time suspending my disbelief.

On the show, every few hundred feet along the sidewalk in built-up areas is stationed a Guardian (ersatz Gestapo goon) armed with a semi-automatic. There would have to be PLA-level manpower available to the regime for this to be possible. And you can't just give this job to any schlub; it has to be a fanatic who wouldn't hesitate to shoot his own mother or sister if she broke the laws (which include that women are no longer allowed to be literate in this society!)

I don't know if the book is better, but the show is awful. It just beats you over the head again and again about how evil this society is and doesn't ever really do much else. Which is a shame because there's the building blocks of a compelling alternate reality in there.

A more measured version that a) has an actual story rather than the main character just glowering at the camera like she's about to go and do something (but never does) and b) prioritizes making Gilead believable over making it horrifying could have been really interesting.

Instead we get nonsense like the "her fault" chant.

Honestly, that’s the modern rot of Hollywood. I don’t know why but they seem to believe that unless you hit the audience over the head with the message that the Evil Regime is Evil and has no redeeming qualities, the audience will miss the point. Maybe I’m odd for reading a lot of medieval and renaissance history, but even then when the Church was very powerful and the concept of human rights was 300 years away and they still didn’t create societies with no redeeming qualities. They cared about stability and their own wealth and power, they had to be strong enough to fend off rivals. But they didn’t really spend a lot of time dreaming up ways to oppress the locals.

there's the building blocks of a compelling alternate reality in there

Like what?

I liked the idea of exploring a world where fertility was much more rare and the way that changed society. The central concept of the fertile women becoming "handmaids" that were highly valued for their ability to bear children was genuinely interesting. But the women were treated so brutally that it kept taking me out of it - even if you're treating these women like livestock, you would still treat them like valuable livestock. I also would have liked to see the ideology and values of Gilead treated more seriously rather than as a fake veneer that no one actually believed in.

I think the book is better primarily because it doesn't overstay its welcome. Season 1 of the show is the story that's in the book, everything else is just made up by the show. So I think the narrative is stronger in the book because it is tighter in scope.

What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?

I don't suppose it's plausible in its totality, but Margaret Atwood's research strategy for the book was to combine cultural practices from real societies into a single place and time. So it's more grounded than many dystopian fictions.

What I heard sounds like a rather implausible society, certainly not a stable one with everyone being sterile or miserable. Is more behind it than just the stylish production design with the read robes and white hats?

Yes, softcore porn. It's 1984 meets 50 Shades of Grey.

That people still think pieces of paper protect them after all we've lived through in the past few years never ceases to amaze me.

Now granted, constitutions are a powerful kind of magic, but they too must yield to power. Otherwise you'd still be able to own warships unimpeded.

Let's say I get elected with a loyal enough congress. What exactly is stopping me from packing the court and reinterpreting the constitution to always have meant what I want to do? Precedent didn't stop Roe from happening. And it didn't require any amendment to straight up make up constitutional law this way.

Now sure, what can be done so can be undone so. But that just means whoever Calvinballs his way to dictatorship first wins. All that protects you is decorum and violence. Nothing else. Insisting on ritual is not going to change that.

But that just means whoever Calvinballs his way to dictatorship first wins.

I read this as "Whoever violates the constitution first gets to then do whatever he or she wants to the constitution."

There are so many assumptions - electoral, legal, judicial - baked into that statement that it is logically equivalent to "a wizard did it!"

A wizard being some FDR tier politician in this case.

Nothing stops you. But a loyal enough congress is a pretty big stipulation, especially when Republicans disproportionately seem to care about what the text of the Constitution actually says, and are used to having to worry about how things look for the purpose of reelection.

We really need a constitutional amendment safeguarding the supreme court, as that would make the particular avenue you describe significantly harder to pull off.

Let's say I get elected with a loyal enough congress. What exactly is stopping me from packing the court and reinterpreting the constitution to always have meant what I want to do? Precedent didn't stop Roe from happening. And it didn't require any amendment to straight up make up constitutional law this way.

in theory, separation of powers. The different branches of government are supposed to selfishly seek power for themselves. Congress is supposed to be constantly look to take power for itself, which stops the president from becoming a dictator.

In practice that kind of fails because most individual congressman just don't have any real power, so it's easy for them to give up power to the party apparatus in hopes of eventually becoming a senior party leader or leaving to become a lobbyist. But each individual Justice really does have a lot of power, so I can't see them giving it up voluntarily to a dictator.

In fairness, look at what some of our doomposters here believe: that the Democrats literally ignore laws with impunity because they are in control, so the Constitution is fake and gay and any claims that they can't do X or Y or Z are just cope.

It's not hard to believe that rabid partisans on the other side like Marcotte believe that Republicans can and will just ignore laws and everyone will go along with it because.

It's maybe a nitpick, maybe not - but there is a difference between ignorning laws and actually changing them in what would be plainly against the individual freedom concepts embedded in the constitution.

Ignoring or selectively enforcing laws (or, on another level, choosing to interpret laws in a certain way) is commonplace no matter who holds power in the executive branch. Congress and The President get to fight it out. The backstop to that has always been individual liberties - specifically those laid out in the constitution and, otherwise, those with deep precedent.

There is room for legitimate doomerism on both sides, but there is also, in my opinion, a difference between unlikely and fanciful. To take a Red Tribe issue of note; the idea that the Federal government could ever confiscate already owned guns is fantasy. The idea that they could make everyone register their guns or be subject to search is far fetched but plausible.

Marcotte and her ilk start with the fanciful and ridiculous as "legitimate concern" territory and then use a logical structure full of gaps and deeply nested assumptions to get there. It's a bad in product and process.

To take a Red Tribe issue of note; the idea that the Federal government could ever confiscate already owned guns is fantasy.

Can I be skeptical that this is so far fetched? Unlikely, sure, but all it would take is a 5-4 SCOTUS decision to claim the 2A does not confer an individual right to own guns. Right now, with the current SCOTUS lineup that won't happen, but give it a generation or two, some unlucky deaths/retirements, or court packing and we could quickly be there.

It may be bias on my end, but I also feel the more conservative members of SCOTUS who are textualists (and to a lesser extent originalists) are less partisan and more consistent with their rulings on the whole than the more liberal side whose motivating principle seems to be more about how they think society should be.

No, they can't. The federal government might be able to declare that they have the right to do such a thing but actually going and doing it is another matter, like deporting twenty million illegals. It's just not doable.

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