YOUR REMINDER THAT THE HANDMAID’S TALE DEPICTED ENTIRELY THINGS THAT WERE ALREADY DONE TO GLOBAL MAJORITY WOMEN The novelty was just that they were being done to white women please, it’s not some startling new ground being broken ok - ThreadSky

theradr.bsky.social • 9 days ago

YOUR REMINDER THAT THE HANDMAID’S TALE DEPICTED ENTIRELY THINGS THAT WERE ALREADY DONE TO GLOBAL MAJORITY WOMEN

The novelty was just that they were being done to white women

please, it’s not some startling new ground being broken ok

Comments

tasiaf.bsky.social•9 days ago

yeah i realized she was a piece of shit a while back. i wish white women would stop sucking up to this old dried up bag of racism

cageyratfish.bsky.social•9 days ago

THANK YOU!! Also, Margaret Atwood is a sexual-harasser-defending, Pretendian-supporting, TERF & i really wish people would stop putting her on a pedestal as some kind of Wise Woman For These Times

laz1985.bsky.social•9 days ago

I’d heard the opposite. About the TERF bit, I mean. I’m not doubting you; I’d just like to see sources.

gregoryaight.bsky.social•9 days ago

I remember when it happened on Twitter. Here is the event: https://broadview.org/margaret-atwood-trans-tweets/

laz1985.bsky.social•8 days ago

Fucking hell. Time to get rid of my copies of her books.

gregoryaight.bsky.social•8 days ago

And she never actually doubled back to repair anything, as you can well imagine.

cageyratfish.bsky.social•9 days ago

yep

staceyellisfisher.bsky.social•9 days ago

In her defence, she did write that rich white women would be complicit in and responsible for the oppression of other women, so her attitude tracks.

nohate23.bsky.social•8 days ago

We already know the uneducated women ensnared in their rich oppressor husbands’ hands are white.

theradr.bsky.social•9 days ago

Mmhmm

bigbogbug.bsky.social•8 days ago

One of Atwood's inspirations was the 1979 Iranian revolution. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (graphic novel and animated movie) covers that same history and the rollback in rights that Iranian women and girls especially underwent -- unlike Atwood, Satrapi was drawing/writing from personal experience.

janagainor.bsky.social•9 days ago

I see what Atwood did was highlight what already happens all over the world, but made it but not just ok, made it law. Kinda like this Trump is making racism ok...

elenloth.bsky.social•9 days ago

"The Terrorists of Irustan" is a great alternative take on THT. It's set on a fictional planet colonized by ?Yemen?.

s-hg.bsky.social•9 days ago

...Isn't that also written by a white woman? Is there information on what resources she used to avoid the traps associated with writing a culture based on a different culture?

elenloth.bsky.social•9 days ago

No idea! I'd love other book recs if you got 'em though!

s-hg.bsky.social•9 days ago

A quick search for POC authors of dystopian fiction brings up:
NK Jemison
Rebecca Roanhorse
Octavia E. Butler
Ling Ma
Nalo Hopkinson
Nnedi Okorafor
Tochi Onyebuchi
Kazuo Ishiguro
Samuel R. Delany
Jennifer Marie Brissett
Tenea D. Johnson
London Shah

... which really should all go on my TBR list.

butwhatifido.bsky.social•8 days ago

+River Solomon. Just finished An Unkindness of Ghosts. Haunting and Amazing.

elenloth.bsky.social•8 days ago

Anyway if you ever figure out your questions about that other author let us know! I just like to read books and I recommend the ones that I liked.

s-hg.bsky.social•8 days ago

Noted! It's hard for me to read dystopian currently, but if I do find out, definitely will return.

elenloth.bsky.social•8 days ago

Jemisin, Okorafor, and Butler are CLASSICS and I've read the bulk of each one's oeuvre!

Parable² is especially poignant right now.

cherylgoldk.bsky.social•9 days ago

I am currently reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, lots of parallels to what is happening now. She even set her future dystopian society in 2025.

lilithgrace.bsky.social•9 days ago

Thank you.

jakepaulsartre.bsky.social•9 days ago

Please tell me liberals aren't doing the Handmaids Tale cosplay again

oldunclemalky.bsky.social•9 days ago

Edict 770 in Romania under Ceaucescu was her top influence. The white supremacy in the book was pretty blatant, but the narrator was white and reacted like an oblivious white person about it.

ericabuist.bsky.social•9 days ago

She did say that her rule when writing it was that she wouldn’t include anything that hadn’t really happened

cellarette.bsky.social•8 days ago

She is an artist. It's not her job to fix it, it's her job to tell a story, to capture your attention and keep it as long as she can.

(However, if she turned out a MAGA, stop-the-steal, anti vaxxer . . . I'd appreciate her work less. But I'm human.)

ikacprzak.bsky.social•9 days ago

The show whinged by dropping the racism

revdryorkie.bsky.social•9 days ago

THIS. My beloved home state has long participated in Atwood horrors.

redheadinthecity.bsky.social•9 days ago

Afghanistan NOW is a pure dystopian horror show.

It’s abhorrent what is happening with almost zero comment or pushback from many.

ralucahippie.bsky.social•9 days ago

They were done to White women too if they were on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. (Women in Ceaușescu's Romania for example were subjected to forced gynecological exams, not to promote women's health but to detect/preempt illegal abortions).

maqart55.bsky.social•9 days ago

Atwood has always said she drew on events that had already occurred or were occurring.

Which is why Oryx and Crake (or should we call it Oryx and Elon?) is completely and comprehensively terrifying.

allie-ruelle.bsky.social•9 days ago

Oryx and Crake is slept on, we're heading for that world so fast right now.

maqart55.bsky.social•9 days ago

Just tell me I don't have to be a Snowman...

kaboosemoose.bsky.social•9 days ago

THIS

solveforgenx.bsky.social•9 days ago

Tawny Newsome called it “slavery cosplay” on Yo, is This Racist? and … yes, exactly

christinh.bsky.social•9 days ago

Thank you for this! I

blerdbeats.bsky.social•7 days ago

Well...white women ARE about to get that "Quiverfull" smoke for how they voted last election, so it's relevant.

Because the nu white supremacist movement doesn't want brown babies.

arabbookworm.bsky.social•9 days ago

I stopped watching the show because her white privilege kept showing up and messing things up and they never addressed it.

arabbookworm.bsky.social•9 days ago

I also wonder how much that show contributed to the current catastrophe too. Too many women dressing up as Handmaids “in protest” and certain people going oooh good. It gave a roadmap emotionally, so to speak.

theradr.bsky.social•9 days ago

A fetish.

theradr.bsky.social•9 days ago

Yeah, I couldn’t even watch the show. It was clear they botched it from the start. I’m all for race-tweaking casting but they never should have made Moira Black—for all her TERFiness Atwood made it clear that it was a white supremacist society that had committed horrors to the “children of Ham”.

arabbookworm.bsky.social•9 days ago

It could have been so excellent and also dealt with some of the dynamics of “poc conservatives” which is a fb thread I’m in. Which we HAVE to talk about. And they could have talked about June’s own white supremacy, too…. But noooooo

themusesappho.bsky.social•8 days ago

What drives me crazy is that the television show strips out what little content about it being white supremacist society that's present in the book.

Why make Gilead post-racial?

theradr.bsky.social•9 days ago

Atwood (stand corrected re Terf) made it clear, if too subtly, that it was a white supremacist society.

Her FAILURE was not spelling out that the things in that book actually happen to real actual people now.

Every day.

Usually the hands of white women and men.

She didn’t make it explicit.

slotrak.bsky.social•7 days ago

She did though. Every interview she gave when the book was published, she made that point. More accurate to say people didn't hear her.

elenloth.bsky.social•8 days ago

My friend says she did in an Introduction or Foreword or something, but my copy is old and doesn't have that.

So it sounds like perhaps she recognized that it was too subtle, at some point?

Shame about the terfitude though, that's gross.

elenloth.bsky.social•8 days ago

Found an interview!

https://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-testaments-real-life-inspiration

the-1-and-only.bsky.social•9 days ago

But as a writer of fiction, especially the type she writes, to spell these things out dumbs it down significantly for the audience. Did you read Oryx and Crake and that series? Brutal and certainly weighing into racial issues and caste

earlmson.bsky.social•8 days ago

"Her FAILURE", that's overly judgmental , it's a work of fiction from 1985 and it was prescient. Also it's not her job to do performative breast beating when the US electorate makes bad choices. I

jameswsthomson.com•9 days ago

She did in a foreword to a later edition, not sure how soon that came after the original.

padraigkingsley.bsky.social•8 days ago

…is that really a "failure" though? The book literally ends by pointing out that it's happening IN CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS of all places. Even otherwise, subtlety is not a "failure" of art. It's a choice. Pedantry doesn't always work so well either!

unbluebird.bsky.social•9 days ago

It was written in the 80s...
Failure? To predict the actual outcome?
Wow.
How close to current reality was she supposed to be???

seanlb.bsky.social•8 days ago

She isn't criticizing it for not predicting the future, she's criticizing it for not explicitly acknowledging things that were already happening at the time it was written.

unbluebird.bsky.social•8 days ago

It was written for an audience.
A readership specific one.
The critique was unnecessary.
The work stands as it's written. You can't make it do what it wasn't intended to do.
A false respective.

themusesappho.bsky.social•9 days ago

Did you not read the epilogue where Atwood all but turns to the audience and says "I DIDN'T MAKE ANY OF THIS UP, IT'S ALL FROM REAL EVENTS THAT HAVE HAPPENED RECENTLY"?

I agree that she was way too subtle about the off screen genocide but not spelling out that these were real events? Really?

theradr.bsky.social•9 days ago

She made it clear that the book was a white supremacist society through a few very deft lines—she could have chosen solidarity with the people harmed now if she had wanted, esp through the academic discussions at the end. 1-2 sentences planted somewhere. Done.

Her smug move when Roe fell showed

theradr.bsky.social•9 days ago

Me that the primary concern wasn’t with all the people who would suffer, die, be trapped in or pulled into poverty, trapped in or murdered by abusive relationships, by the way systems of oppression compound marginalization & harm wrt bans, raise maternal & infant mortality rates who cares, toldja so

theradr.bsky.social•9 days ago

Anyway, the point stands. Please, enough with the HANDMAID’S references. I loved that book and reread it annually for many years, but it belongs in context.

And the context is not white women fears and tears. It’s not.

craigmranapia.bsky.social•9 days ago

I've been saying for weeks that everyone should be swapping out their tatty copies of THE HANDMAID'S TALE for Mark Twain's THE GILDED AGE and Anthony Trollope's THE WAY WE LIVE NOW. They haven't dated anywhere near enough...

cellarette.bsky.social•8 days ago

Look up Twain and his bro TR.