Posted on 10/09/2018 10:54:51 AM PDT by Morgana
New York Times editors must have thought Alexandra Alter’s article a timely response to conservative Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation: “How Feminist Dystopian Fiction Is Channeling Women’s Anger and Anxiety.”
Thanks to President Trump’s attacks on women’s rights America’s, women are just a few weeks away from mandatory Handmaid’s Tale uniforms, judging by this ominous overview of recent novels in the genre.
On a desolate island, three sisters have been raised in isolation, sequestered from an outbreak that’s causing women to fall ill. To protect themselves from toxins, which men can transmit to women, the sisters undergo cleansing rituals that include simulating drowning, drinking salt water and exposing themselves to extreme heat and cold. Above all, they are taught to avoid contact with men.
That’s the chilling premise of Sophie Mackintosh’s unsettling debut novel The Water Cure, a story that feels both futuristic and like an eerily familiar fable. It grew out of a simple, sinister question: What if masculinity were literally toxic?
The Water Cure, which comes out in the United States in January and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, joins a growing wave of female-centered dystopian fiction, futuristic works that raise uncomfortable questions about pervasive gender inequality, misogyny and violence against women, the erosion of reproductive rights and the extreme consequences of institutionalized sexism.
For Ms. Mackintosh, those questions don’t feel abstract.
….
This new canon of feminist dystopian literature — which includes works by up-and-coming novelists like Ms. Mackintosh, Naomi Alderman, Leni Zumas and Idra Novey, as well as books by celebrated veterans like Louise Erdrich and Joyce Carol Oates — reflects a growing preoccupation among writers with the tenuous status of women’s rights, and the ambient fear that progress toward equality between the sexes has stalled or may be reversed.
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Canadian writer Margaret Atwood and her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the founding document for the current feminist dystopian movement, gets respectfully cited as foreshadowing a real-life threat to women’s rights.
Lately, Ms. Atwood’s imaginary dystopia has inspired real-life political activism, as protesters dressed as handmaids in red robes and white bonnets have gathered at state capitols around the country to oppose policies that restrict women’s access to abortion and health care. In September, a group of red-robed women protested at the United States Senate during hearings for Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court after being accused of committing sexual assault, and could potentially cast a decisive vote overturning Roe v. Wade.
“The moment that we’re in is terrifying for a lot of women, and the story that Margaret Atwood created captures that fear so incredibly well,” said Lori Lodes, an adviser for Demand Justice, a liberal advocacy group that organized the recent protests at the Senate.
Alter encouraged these wild flights of fictional fancy as real-life electoral warnings.
Christina Dalcher’s debut novel, Vox, where women are limited to speaking 100 words a day at pain of electric shock, “was inspired in part by the women’s marches around the country after the 2016 election.”
….
[Louise] Erdrich began writing the book many years ago, when she was pregnant with her fourth daughter. She set it aside until shortly after the 2016 presidential election, when, with a Republican-controlled Congress and White House, liberal activists raised alarms about the potential threat to women’s reproductive rights. Ms. Erdrich began to worry about what the world would be like if the gains made decades ago through women’s liberation movements were lost.
To her credit, Alter also briefly addressed places where The Handmaid’s Tale is sadly not far from reality for women. She mentioned “China’s former one-child policy, a rule that led to sex-selection abortion of female fetuses.” Pakistani writer Bina Shah was quoted: “In patriarchy, women are always going to end up being the losers. What’s going on now in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan is worse than what’s happening in The Handmaid’s Tale.”
For once, that’s not liberal exaggeration.
But then Alter returned to Handmaid’s author Atwood, described as “a sort of patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction,” to claim “There’s certainly a very concerted push toward making women’s bodies a possession of the state in the United States.”
How does protecting human life in the womb add up to ownership by the state?
I think of radical feminism as a sort of self-exclusion program, it warns off the unwary male.
I guess I should have identified my comment as ironic.
Go outside and screech hysterically at the sky.
none of the dire consequences they predicted come about
Rant and rave mindlessly against the "patriarchy". Dye their hair a different shade of green. Get another nose piercing. Get another XXXX piercing. Do something unspeakable with their "partners". Go outside and screech hysterically at the sky.
Feminism has always been anti-male, pro-lesbian.
“...I would say there is a good reason God didn’t place women as the head.
God never put a women as head of families, church, nations and it was a very good decision.....”
Yep. The Founding Fathers recognized it early on and kept them out of politics/govt. It had nothing to do with being “sexist” and everything to do with keeping emotionally charged rhetoric away from the arena where sound reasoning and logic needed to be.
What’s even more weird that this drivel, is the fact that somewhere, every day, it makes the news.
Journalism schools must be teaching that anything other than backyard, over the fence, gossip, is news. Not just “news”, but National, “Breaking”, “Bombshell”, “Alert”, news.
And womens issues are all because it’s “their time of the month”
As long as we are generalizing to the ridiculous
Mental, she is.
Once upon a time, we viewed ‘Trigglypuff” as a stark raving lunatic. Compared to the Kavanaugh haters, she’s calm, collected, and reasonable ...
It really comes down to the definition of “feminism”.
If it means women should have equal rights, be treated like everyone else, etc., that’s one thing.
If it means women get their cake and men are their slaves, that’s another.
Toxic Democrat feminism is about turning men into slaves.
They are not known for objectivity or introspection.
China practiced female infanticide for thousands of years.
“Toxic Democrat feminism is about turning men into slaves.”
Women want to do what they want to do, and you will do what they want you to do.
It doesn’t really have much to do with Democrat, they are this way almost everywhere in every relationship.
This sexist jerko should go to her apartment and hug her dozens of cats.
Hatred porn.
Hey, I’ve got you toxic...right here.
Gosh this great actor is doing a quit smoking ad.
He got old!!
So did I!
LIBTARDO-MALTOBAN to the triggered! They will be the first to go when the big one hits.
And gentleman, they are counting on you to hold the door for them.
NO WAY. You did not like our men well to heck with you!!
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