Fiction Is Fiction
CONSIDER WHAT MAKES Margaret Atwood's Handmaiden's Tale so horrific, the subjugation of women by male authority - with the collusion of other women - their loss of personal and even bodily autonomy through terrorism, the enforcement of the will of others through violence by those enforcing that will on them. Being turned into birth machines, modern-day concubines - though whenever sex is involved, in reality, that will be the primary motivation for such a scenario no matter what the pretense. And never forget that violence is an intrinsic part of any subjugation and any terror, without violence and the threat of pain, murder or death no subjugation would ever succeed.
The imaginary scenario of Margaret Atwood may be apt for some particularly horrific socio-religious contexts right now, "honor" murders in Iran, intimately related to child marriage as mentioned, were reported on by the BBC again the other day. Though there are scholars of Islam and Islamic cultures who will point out that those murders are a violation of their conception of Islam and are a product of secular culture. Though obviously there are others who disagree, some who claim expertise and are held to be experts. I don't know, I'm neither such a scholar of nor am I sufficiently informed as to whether or not that is the case. Since many Muslims don't do such things, I don't think it's inevitably a feature of Islam.
It is indisputable that it is a terror crime of long standing in countries in which Women are regularly murdered by boy-friends, husbands, fathers, brothers, other family members and it doesn't seem that the civil or religious authorities are really doing much to stop it there. There are certainly murders of Women on similar excuses in entirely non-Islamic contexts, I suspect if Islam suddenly disappeared from those countries, the murders would continue as they probably happened before Islam arose.
They are certainly documented in many polytheistic and pagan contexts. The murders of unwanted wives, daughters-in-law, etc. is a feature of, for example, some Hindu cultures, perhaps more accurately, they occur within a nominally Hindu milieu.
Horrific sexual subjugation of Women certainly happens in a totally atheist context. It seems to me that the training of teenage girls to be concubines for the North Korean military-fascist elite is a close day equivalent to the fantasies of Margaret Atwood in reality. The rape-murder of Women by some of the elites in Stalin's Soviet Union is certainly not attributable to religion. I wouldn't be shocked to find that is common in the anti-religious regimes throughout history. About the only one I know of in which that might not be as true was the short-lived Paris Commume where prostitution was abolished for a short time. When you don't believe there are moral absolutes you tend to do what you want to, especially if you have power. All of the agnostic and atheist contented cattle on every college faculty who are too contented to do much more than fool around with their students and colleagues won't convince me that isn't true among anyone with the energy to pursue real power.
But the Handmaiden's Tale isn't set in those Islamic majority countries where such murders and such terror exists, it happens in what is certainly English speaking North America in "Christian" milieu where such "honor" killings are far rarer in an Islamic context as well as being rare in a "Christian" context. Though there are an enormous number of murders of Women outside of any religious context in every day life, right now, as there has been all along, including during the period that Atwood may have considered the high-point (so far) of "liberal democracy." As I've mentioned before, when I researched the issue of Women who were murdered because of their gender, the figure then was an average of four a day in the United States which, if you consider what is being described is different from lynching only in the word used, is horrific.
I'm going to repeat that. Under secular American secularized culture, government and law, there are Women murdered, often brutally, every day, right now, Women live restricted lives because of that and if they transgress the limits of safety, the general attitude is that they are "asking for" what happens to them. And even as they are terrorized by it, they are encouraged to dangerously make themselves vulnerable to those consequences. I have gotten some flack recently for pointing out that as that happens, Women are encouraged and enticed by the popular culture into making themselves more vulnerable through the use of alcohol, encouraged to become participants in their own victimization. Certainly that's a part of such a "Handmaiden" scenario - without alcohol as date rape drug - as it would really be. But this isn't directly about that.
The greatest irony of Margaret Atwood's championing of "liberal democracy" is that I would suppose for many that would include the pornogrification of culture, both pop kulcha and elite kulcha. The pornogrification of culture is one of the things which liberal democracy of the 18th century kind, today, frequently pats itself on the back for. And that goes back to the time when the Marquis de Sade became one of the members of the Revolutionary Government in post Revolutionary France. The "liberty" to produce his glorification of the sexual violence practiced by the strong against the weak, an act of male "fraternity" which belies the "equality" that such 18th century conceptions of liberalism always do contradict - It should be remembered that France didn't extend the vote to Women until after it was liberated in WWII NOT THAT ENGLISH SPEAKING NATIONS HAVE MUCH TO CROW ABOUT EITHER. I have long wished I could find the exact source of the quote from a Black Union soldier who noted that he was not in the war to preserve the Constitution because he and his People had been held in slavery by it for its entire history. Women should be as skeptical of it or any such constitution or document which does not assert their actual equality as the United States Constitution does not and which Women are about to be reminded of, powerfully. American "liberal democracy" has never really been about equality of Women or People of Color or those with less, it has been about the liberty of those with more, especially straight, white men of affluence to lord it over the rest, with a diminishing number of such privileges allowed to white males of decreasing affluence, set up so that those beneath them are the ones who get blamed and feared when they fear losing their measure of privileges.
"Liberal democracy," with which subjugation and oppression, legal and merely by long custom and neglect is entirely compatible is, certainly, compatible with the level of violence and even threat of death - if death by neglect and refusal to aid. The level of violence that those forms of subjugation and oppression require to stand is obviously compatible with liberal democracy.
Equality, real equality in life, in physical, material security and well being, held under a moral law of justice that includes those and which generates the thought habits of really believing that is how it should be AND HOW WE SHOULD ACT. Without that equality "liberty" will always be a game of the ability to amass wealth and privilege to those with a leg up, exactly what has happened under "liberal democracy" in the United States and elsewhere. It was always set up to be that from the beginning.
It was less verbally explicit in the American forms of that, the enslavement and concurrent rape of Black Women (certainly children and, at times men), something certainly practiced by that great hero of 18th century liberal democracy, Thomas Jefferson and almost as certainly by other heroes of American liberal democracy. Certainly it was a liberty taken by others with the "founders" knowledge and, in no case I know of, their open disapproval. It is clear that even John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were passive acceptors of it in their support for the Constitution. I have not studied any legal proscription of it and since I've come across no mention of that, I'm betting it was never made illegal. That kind of rape, especially in the context of chattel slavery is a specialized form of violence within the general violence of legal or non-legal slavery.
It was certainly not infrequently visited on poor Women, working Women not held in formal, legal slavery, even today. I remember one of my mother's friends, during the Clarence Thomas hearings when Anita Hill revealed his history of sexual abuse of her that it was common all during her working life as a nurse and back then, she said, if you wanted to keep working, "you just took it." My mother's friend considered Anita Hill a heroine for being one of the few who risked their careers to reveal that about a powerful man with the kind of patronage Thomas had and has. There is nothing he did that wasn't an intrinsic part of "liberal democracy" and that is provable by the history of life under it and the reaction of many a champion of such "liberty" to Women's rights as those were asserted. Consider the backlash to Me-too. The whining about the loss of "liberty." The far from totally successful campaign to make workplace sexual harassment and abuse illegal is far less of a success even as such commercial and show biz kulcha encouragement of men and boys to engage in it has flourished under the "liberal democratic" regime of free-speech-press. I wrote about one such liberty-practicing multi-millionaire sexual abuse tycoon here the other day.
Most ironic to me are those champions of such "liberal democracy" who are big fans of Atwood's Handmaiden franchise is that I'll bet most of them are big fans of the sex industry, prostitution, pay-per-view prostitution which, in reality, may well be the closest thing we have to an actual Atwood scenario in North America and Europe and other places where porn is produced, today. The images sold to men, their messages strengthened, enhanced and encouraged by sexual arousal, are so common, the use and enslavement and actual violent abuse of women are so common that they are easily acceptable even by those who will watch the make believe actors or read the fiction of Handmaiden and, since those are so bizarrely strange, will get worked up over the make believe future of it as the reality of it easily found in even the most innocuous computer searches, much of it the sadistic abuse of women held in slavery or taken advantage of through addiction or economic desperation is seen as a positive thing, an expression of "liberty" of "The First Amendment" working the way it should because, heaven forbid that Congress should outlaw such stuff as the sexual degradation of Women, or gay men, such stuff is rampant in gay porn.
I would include that such prohibitions of involving children as might, at least for now, withstand a Supreme Court Challenge are certainly violated flagrantly online where the "models" or "actors" are most certainly not 18 or older in many cases. And, since the damage of those includes the encouragement of men and boys to practice that, the simulation of it which may be technically not child porn, has the same effect on its consumers as the real thing. The abuse, use, enslavement, destruction you see on a screen or a page is probably the tip of an iceberg of practice in those who are encouraged to do what they see.
The scary dream of such "theocracy" as imagined by Atwood is certainly something that should be prevented though I think its promotion is more of a scare-tale like the old Brit anti-Catholic hate lit, it has more in common with Chick Publications than would be comfortable to consider. But there is not nothing to it if kept tied to reality. I think, given the role that organized religion had in the impending nationalization of Women's bodies by the Supreme Court, that that is an entirely legitimate aspect to be addressed in fighting against it. But that also ignores that there is certainly more organized religion that supports Women's right to their own bodily integrity and ownership and that any religious influence in that direction is no less religion trying to influence things. I'm sure those whose motive is to despise religion would complain that that is also a danger of "theocracy". Given that many, probably most American Catholics disagree with the bishops, Cardinals and Popes on making abortion illegal,* given that many Catholics ignore the teachings of the Church on matters related to sex and in other ways, the dangers of "theocracy" are way overblown, generally. Though in some states where even more rigidly enforced hierarchies of some other religions, Mormonism, perhaps the Southern Baptists, there is something to worry about. The present day Supreme Court is creating a Jane Crow system in which many states will turn Women back to the worst of the bad old days just as they are making it states to reinstall legal discrimination against Black and other People of Color. But the real enslavement of Women in the United States and other Western countries, today, is far more likely to find its most extreme forms in those bastions of "liberal democracy" such as described above.
But for women without means, women addicted, women entrapped, worse is real right now and in many of the most progressive states in the country. Women are held in bondage as extreme as merely imagined by Atwood and her colleagues in some make-belief future wherever prostitution and the production of porn are engaged in.
The irony of this is that the Supreme Court under John Roberts, as under Rehnquist, under Berger and under Warren, etc. are and were bastions of "liberal democracy," to one extent or another. Once the Warren Court started demolishing the old-fashioned restrictions on the explicit sex-show-biz industry and the fascists on the Court realized the boon to them and the billionaires they work for that freeing the media to lie with impunity under "The First Amendment" was, they were all-in on it, that trade-off worked far, far better for them and the billionaires than it did Women, than it did the working class, than the wage-slaves or, certainly, the Women and others held in bondage by the sex industry, chewed up and spat out by it. The biggest fattest champions of "liberal democracy" are libertarian men, many are Atwood's colleagues in the show-biz and scribbling and publishing rackets, many, perhaps most of whom are quite comfortable with the most degrading and diminishing of Women and whoever else they want to use in the ways dreamed of by de Sade. In fact, as I've pointed out before, as mis-identified a feminist as Simone de Beauvoir championed Sade in exactly "liberal democratic" terms.
I have come to have an enormous skepticism for any supposed champion of liberation who is a devotee to that 18th century conception of "liberty" unattached to a higher moral purpose. Liberty to do what, responsibility for the results never seems to be a real consideration in even the cleverest of them.
I have repeatedly encouraged those on the left to give up their romantic fantasies about the 18th century and its rhetoric about "liberty" about other such clap trap because the real history of those who spouted that stuff shows why it has produced such terrible results. That is certainly not because I favor any return to what preceded that, we have to reject any try to return or maintain any past because that is a dead hand holding us back from getting past ALL OF THAT and on with making a decent, sustainable future. It's not that there is nothing in the past that is worth considering, not every idea held or expressed by those in the past is bad and much of it can be learned from, even a lot of the bad stuff can be learned from as a caution. But not if the real results of those things in our history and today are not faced and we admit that those are a real result of trying to put those into practice. If we maintain those romantic unrealistic, we will repeat the same evils that resulted before. It is the stupidest thing in American culture today, the idea that because some long-dead 18th century enslavers and crooks, genocidalists and racists said something, we have to live by that forever no matter what results have already come from them, no matter how many of even the hardest lessons experience has given us.
I would encourage Atwood to junk the 18th century and move on, her nightmares coming true is a product of the "liberal democracy" the "free speech absolutism" that I suspect she believes in with all of her heart. Women get lied into voting against their own and most intimately and importantly held rights by the lies of the mass media, they get suckered into it by freely told lies in their private lives. So do men. They get lied out of holding themselves as fully and rightfully free and entitled to dignity and a decent life by those who are permitted to tell those lies under liberal democracy and the culture that it has produced, here in North America, right now. You don't have to worry about some imaginary reproduction of some historically disconnected fictitious Hollywood idea of Puritan New England, some Brit hate-lit horror show of Medieval Catholic Europe or even the importation of today's worst realities for Women under Islamic governments. Lots of women got there with all of the "liberty" that modern Courts have given us, show-biz and publishing are in it as thick as thieves.
One of the most discouraging things that has happened in my life is being witness to the success with which the backlash against second-wave feminism has made things worse than they were in the early 1970s. Things I hoped would die with my generation are reproduced in ever worse forms among young people, young women accepting things being done to them by males that normalize what would have been seen as extreme fifty years ago. The internet, its libertine libertarianism has made things so much worse. And it's getting worse as time goes on with all of the liberty of speech and publication in the world. All of the "First Amendment" blather become reality.
One of the ironies in Atwood's championing of "liberal democracy" is that her own words hold up one of the greatest dangers under it, especially under the current understandings of "free speech-press". I found the quote while looking up reviews of Handmaiden's Tale from Women at the time it was published, finding the really deep review of Mary McCarthy which is posted with a shorter commentary by Caryn James, who quotes the author saying, ''Anyone who wants power will try to manipulate you by appealing to your desires and fears, and sometimes your best instincts. Women have to be a little cautious about that kind of appeal to them. What are we being asked to give up?''
Certainly that is a perfect description of how the pornographers, the promoters of prostitution, the entire ad industry and much of popular entertainment have enslaved Women, starting when they were girls. They got talked out of equality in an entirely commercial-secular context, most of them never having much ever really taking religion seriously.
* You can be against abortion as a moral consideration and still be opposed to it being made illegal. Making abortion illegal won't do much to stop abortions, it only makes abortions unregulated, dangerous and deadly, victimizing women who exercise ownership of their own bodies and providing opportunities for some of the scummiest of prosecutors, judges, politicians and others as well as the organized criminals who profit from anything that is subject to prohibitions. The only thing keeping abortion as a safe alternative is the government regulation of it. If it were not legal and regulated, legal or illegal, it would be as dangerous as a completely deregulated food industry. Something which is, as well, entirely compatible with "liberal democracy" we know that because a lot of "classical liberals" champions of "liberal democracy" would like us to have one.
The greatest prevention of abortion is the free availability of effective contraception and the education and encouragement of its use from an early age. The U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and other alleged religious entities to the Republican-fascists who will use it for political purposes who oppose the widespread use of contraception are the greatest promoters of abortion we have. I would bet that the bishops opposition to the free use of contraception has been responsible for an enormous percentage of abortions, in reality. Now they want to make those abortions which will continue to happen illegal and unsafe. I don't think the fact that they are (supposedly) chaste, all unmarried men is unrelated to their total removal from the reality of what their positions produce. They're so like judges and "justices" in that who can imagine the good they can do to their own class but who regularly disregard the realities of others. That's not a defect restricted by gender, there are many Women placed on the bench who are fully in on the corrupt racket. And never forget Clarence Thomas.
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