Creeping back into commentary is the notion that male power will be kinder to women if they flatter it. If history can’t demolish this notion, maybe fiction can
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted into a television series. The novel describes an America where a fundamentalist Christian coup swiftly installs a government that excludes all women from civil life. Gender roles become a matter policed by law enforcement. Some women are merely confined to the home, others are forced into slavery.
If you’ve seen the photos of the exclusively male crowd in Donald Trump’s Oval Office signing anti-abortion legislation, the adaption perhaps seems timely. Atwood herself has suggested as much in the New York Times. Her premise writing it in 1985 was to posit the logical conclusion of the anti-feminist agenda she witnessed stirring in the west. Three decades and the internet later, the social undercurrents she explored have lost their subtlety. They are now the explicit character of the White House, in the mass media and everywhere online.
Continue reading...March 31, 2017 at 08:25AM
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from Van Badham
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