This person twisted up the authors note. As academics in the Middle East, a person with Atwood made a statement to the effect of: thankfully this could never happen in the United States. Atwood’s response was to dive into the predominant religion: Christianity, and make it so based further on US political culture.
Abrahamic religions, all three, can get pretty fundamentally awful. Have you read the rules and regs in the Old Testament? There’s a reason evangelicals cherry pick things from it and don’t live by it.
thankfully this could never happen in the United States
I wonder whether those people who said that ever expect a spanish inquisition.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
My parents loved to quote the old testament saying they could kill me if I was a disobedient child.
They sound nice.
I’ve had people straight up say “Gilead is perfectly reasonable given the declining birthrates”. Bro, you can’t think of a better way to solve declining birthrates than ritual rape? Gilead doesn’t even solve it very well in-universe, it does a bunch of stuff that is actually counter to that goal, and there’s no particular reason to think it would do any better in real life.
A friend who recently had a kid said that when she and her husband were building up to having children, she became acutely aware of the government discussing “why are people having fewer kids and how do we ensure that we have a sufficient workforce in the future” and she became increasingly exasperated to hear how out of touch politicians spoke about it, when the actual answer was so simple.
Affordable housing is one of the biggest no-brainers. For example, she is one of only a handful of friends my age (millennial) who owns a home. As someone who has been homeless multiple times due to landlord fuckery, I can’t imagine choosing to have kids if renting a home. That seems so obvious, but she said that she never heard them connect the dots in this way — the government would sometimes talk about the need for more affordable housing, but never in the context of “hmm, we don’t know why people are having fewer kids and how to encourage people to start families”. They literally don’t understand how living in precarity gets to you and it’s depressing
Even if you have a house and a decent wage it’s still fraught, you pay out the nose for childcare to keep the job and then don’t get to spend the time you’d love to with the kids. It’s fucking horrendous.
Sounds like talk you’d find in the same corners where twisted pedophilic “men” discuss teenagers as the only good females, and that minors absolutely should be married off at that age.
Again, I refer to Granny Weatherwax talking about people treated as objects being the basis of sin. Sans religion, just basic sin in regards to living in a society of human beings.
Actually, you want declining birthrate in a modern country. You don’t need 10 kids to work the farm with better technology to plant and harvest and help take care of the animals. You don’t need 5 kids to go to the factory to support you because you’re legally not allowed to work because you’re a woman. You have better food and better medicine so you don’t need to hedge your bets on which of your 6 kids is going to live to be an adult.
…?
How could this never happen in the United States?
Have you never been to the south? They have endless churches chanting for stuff not far off from this.
The southern baptist convention literally exists because they wanted to define Christianity with God specifically choosing slavery of the white man over black people as commanded, they used stuff like this as basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham
I really worry sometimes, I didn’t see the book as interesting, because it’s not that far-fetched.
When I was young we could never imagine a psychotic clown like Trump running for office…
…?
Are you confused that you are saying the same thing?
Just about everything in her books happened somewhere, just not all at the same place and time. Some 80s USA, some communist Romania. Just about everyone has oppressed women at some point or other, and continue to do so.
I think the only unrealistic part is that she gets away rather than killed… The TV show especially has her in particularly thick plot armour.
The book is a mesmerizing read. I could not put it down. But I cannot watch the TV show. I tried. It’s too much, too drawn out. I’m a woman. I already understand. I do not need a second play through in excruciating length and detail.
i mean, it doesn’t matter if she wrote it–she’s a woman and needs a man to tell her what’s what.
preferably a right wing christian nationalist man who is most likely better defined as “boy,” and hasn’t been indoctrinated* enough to recognize that he’s exactly the type of character atwood was talking about
*educated
SNL JUST DID A SKIT ON THIS
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The Pack is leaking 👀
“Crank my hog” is a euphism for winding up a pig, right?
JUST BRING EARPLUGS IF YOUR EARS ARE SENSITIVE BECAUSE IT IS LOUD OVER HERE MFER.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, JERKING OFF, AND YELLING!
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IT WARMS MY M’FUKIN HOG TO SEE THE PACK HAS MADE IT TO LEMMY
My ears hurt reading this, what the hell. Whoever designed the human body was high af.
I LOVE CLASSIC SNL SKITS, BROTHER! CELEBRITY JEOPARDY ROCKS. ARROOOO
From wikipedia:
Fitting with her statements that The Handmaid’s Tale is a work of speculative fiction, not science fiction, Atwood’s novel offers a satirical view of various social, political, and religious trends of the United States in the 1980s. Her motivation for writing the novel was her belief that in the 1980s, the religious right was discussing what they would do with/to women if they took power, including the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and the Ronald Reagan administration.[12][failed verification] Atwood questions what would happen if these trends, and especially “casually held attitudes about women” were taken to their logical end.[13]
The plot intro:
After a staged attack that killed the President of the United States and most of Congress, a radical political group called the “Sons of Jacob” uses theonomic ideology to launch a revolution.[8] The United States Constitution is suspended, newspapers are censored, and what was formerly the United States of America is changed into a military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead. The new regime moves quickly to consolidate its power, overtaking all other religious groups, including Christian denominations.
The regime reorganizes society using a peculiar interpretation of some Old Testament ideas, and a new militarized, hierarchical model of social and religious fanaticism among its newly created social classes. One of the most significant changes is the limitation of women’s rights. Women become the lowest-ranking class and are not allowed to own money or property, or to read and write. Most significantly, women are deprived of control over their own reproductive functions. Though the regime controls most of the country, there are various rebel groups that are still active.
Fair warning - don’t check out the replies on that post. Literally the dumbest “people” in the universe in there
You’re making it really hard for me to not go see what dumb shit people are lecturing Margaret Atwood about regarding her own novel.
You have been warned. There is nowhere to run
My urge has been defeated by my being too lazy to find the actual tweet.
For the morbidly curious, I found the tweet by going on the author’s profile (using Nitter, naturally) and scrolling down a bit on her posts.
Does Nitter still work? I thought it had died
So an average day on Twitter?
Truly the most “out of context” that account will ever be
Creator level.
Maybe I’m on the wrong level of intelligence, but what am I missin here? Like, the stupidity of mansplaining to the author is hilarious, but am I missin context of what Islam vs Christianity in regards to women voting and shedding their red an whites?
The book wasn’t about Islam. It also wasn’t about Christianity. It was about the Dominion Theorcracy which resembles more what we see with the religious extremists in America.
Edit: I would like to add that it also fits religious extremism in Islamic countries, but that’s not what the aim of the author was. She definitely meant America and their extremists. She even created a flag that looks awfully similar to the American flag.
Dominion Theology is a group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their personal understandings of biblical law. Extents of rule and ways of achieving governing authority are varied. For example, Dominion Theology can include theonomy, but does not necessarily involve advocating Mosaic law as the basis of government. The label is applied primarily toward groups of Christians in the United States.
The red and white garb is from The Handmaid’s Tale. I think the original cartoon might be suggesting that the voting booth is a chance for women to shed the garb that’s representative of patriarchal oppression. Given reproductive rights are a big topic this election, I think that seems true, to an extent.
For figuring out what the twitter user was talking about, let’s consider a more general interpretation of the cartoon, such as “the themes of theocratic and patriarchal oppression are relevant to this US election”. It seems that they have picked up on the fact that theocratic patriarchy is a thing in the Handmaid’s Tale, but they have (likely due to cognitive dissonance) concluded that the author clearly couldn’t be talking about Christianity, because Christianity is Good, and they are Christian, and they are also Good, you see?
Now, I haven’t actually read The Handmaid’s Tale, so I don’t know to what extent it is targeted allegorical criticism at Christianity. It is true that some Muslims also ascribe to (and attempt to enforce on others) a theocratic patriarchal ideology, and also the shape of this kind of oppression looks pretty similar no matter what religion is driving the theocracy — so it’s certainly plausible that The Handmaid’s Tale could be used to criticise theocratic patriarchal manifestations of Islam too. However, the twitter user is clearly not thinking along these lines. I think they believe that The Handmaid’s Tale is aimed at Islam because it helps alleviate some of the cognitive dissonance they feel from a book that is directly criticising them. It definitely is very Christian coded though, I feel like this twitter user is so close to getting it that they’re a self-awarewolf
Because certainly not all Christians are patriarchally oppressive. Some do the most progressive, compassionate people I know are Christian and they will be the first to acknowledge the argument that Christianity itself may be inherently patriarchally oppressive (as well as other kinds of oppressive). We can sort of imagine a separation, where there’s an abstract “Christianity”, and then there’s the ways in which Christianity has been used as a tool of oppression by powerful people. I like the way my friend put it: “I really want to say that the assholes [who use Christianity as an excuse to hate and oppress others] aren’t real Christians, but that feels too easy and appealing to do — denouncing them in that way doesn’t feel very Christian of me, because it would allow me to ignore them. I think my duty as a Christian is to acknowledge the discomfort and be on the watch for this and challenge it where I can, especially in my own community.”
TL;DR:
- the Handmaid’s Tale is against religious theocracies (such as what conservatives Christians would have the world look like)
- this election is big for women’s rights, which have been eroded largely by religious conservatives
- a Muslim theocratic patriarchy would look similar to the Christian version, especially considering that theocratic patriarchies aren’t about religion per se, but using religion as a tool of oppression.
- thus the Handmaid’s Tale can be seen as a criticism of both Muslim and Christian theocratic patriarchy, though it’s obvious to most people who have read the book that it is more directly critiquing the Christian variant.
- The twitter user has (presumably) read the book and seems to have been close to “getting the point”, but their xenophobia saved them from having to do some uncomfortable and difficult self reflection about their own (presumed) Christianity.
It wasn’t about mainline Christianity, but it was about Christian-ish extremists. The kind of Christians a Lutheran would look at and say No, we don’t claim them, they’re not Christian even if they say they are.
So, the Evangelical Christians that support Trump, essentially.
Thanks for the super detailed breakdown! It seems kinda like “ice cream with partly cooked confections is delicious, but full of sugar so should be enjoyed in moderation!” “Well obviously you mean brownie batter, not cake batter, cause it tastes better”, in that twitbro’s point doesn’t change a likety-bit of the point of the comics post, oh and OP invented the ice cream, right?
Why would it take place in the US then?
Oh you and your logic.
The hilarious thing to me is that without realizing this guy just wrote an on point summary of The Handmaid’s Tale and the harmful effects of patriarchy in a single Tweet, but not because he explained it well.
Yeah but the burkas in the movie are totally different.
