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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29899 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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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.

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