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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.
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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.
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