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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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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).

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