The Sunday Times - StrawMaid's Tale

Atwood recently was wittering on about stripping being "empowering". I don't need to say more about that.

Is that from personal experience? If not... yeah, you're right, don't really need to say more.

Having just looked her up on an image search I'm also not sure that she eschews 'feminine beauty standards'.

I think being the Grand Doyenne of Letters has gone to her head a bit.
She is constantly courting publicity and acclaim.
She doesn't need to, she is not trying to establish a career, she just enjoys the adulation I think and is terrified of losing it.

(Which is understandable - I'm a sucker for flattery myself, but my flatterers have to work rather harder than hers, poor dears)

I wonder if her reputation as a feminist is built on little more than her being a successful woman; being a woman who doesn't seem bothered about conforming to feminine beauty standards, and being a woman who writes books about awful things happening to women

I think this is chicken and egg. When THT was released there was no internet and reception was largely in B&W printed newspapers and in printed journals. No glossies. I had no real idea what MA looked like. The book 'took off' and it made MA what she is (I am pretty sure that until then she was only known in Canadian circles). Thus, her success is built on that book.

I doubt she is a male mastuabatory fantasy either, which is usually crucial to popular success for women.

Having said that I'm a fat, hairy, scruffy-haired middle-aged feminist who hasn't shaved for 30 years, dyes her hair outrageous colours and dresses for comfort not style (and spends her spare cash on good whisky) - so what would I know.

I have no idea what Marge Piercy looks like BTW.

I would like to echo those words about Edna O'Brien. And yeah, I'm going right off MA these days.

I can't stand any of it. I always get the impression she hates her female characters for some foible or weakness and enjoys watching them suffer

I completely agree.

I don't like Atwood; the blurbs on the back of her books always sound better than the books actually are.
Whilst I would never read or not read a writer because she is or isn't a feminist I have always been a bit sceptical about Atwood's feminist credentials.
The Handmaid's Tale is such a misogynistic, miserable concept. I am sceptical about her claim that everything in it has happened somewhere. It strikes me that to write it requires a degree of not really liking women that much to inflict such misery on her characters.
I wonder if her reputation as a feminist is built on little more than her being a succesful woman; being a woman who doesn't seem bothered about conforming to feminine beauty standards; and being a woman who writes books about awful things happening to women. She is far more feted than Edna O'Brien, who, for me writes far more sympathetically about women. O'Brien however is a very beautiful woman who has always conformed to standards of beauty and seems to enjoy doing so.
Atwood recently was wittering on about stripping being "empowering". I don't need to say more about that.

Margaret Atwood will be a guest editor of the Today programme on Radio 4 over the Christmas period. Her theme will be "change".

I want to put it down to age but in retrospect I think her work has always been on the thin side. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan but The Handmaid's Tale isn't even her best work

I can't stand any of it. I always get the impression she hates her female characters for some foible or weakness and enjoys watching them suffer. I don't think she identified with Offred at all. To me the novel is written from the perspective of a male-gaze - I wonder how many men are not shocked by it, but instead quite like the idea of the set-up?

I've mentioned Marge Piercy before. I still think that 'Woman on the Edge of Time' is one of the best feminist novels out there. It is brutal, hard and challenging, but also demonstrates a real feeling and rapport with women.

Piercy also makes the case for gender-neutrality and the use of neutral pronouns and I suspect that some here will not like it - but it raises some really salient issues for women, women's solidarity, activism and so-on and men won't jerk off to it.

I showed him this and he just couldn't get over the irony of Margaret Atwood being a TRA handmaiden

I'm not sure that it is ironic. MA was always against embodied interpretations of womanhood, which she saw as conservative and essentialising. So were a lot of other feminists at the time. THT explores what she saw as the logical consequence of this when combined with Christian fundamentalism and new-right thinking.

Bloody hell this is so disappointing.

I want to put it down to age but in retrospect I think her work has always been on the thin side. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan but The Handmaid's Tale isn't even her best work.

Cats Eye, The Edible Woman and Surfacing are far more indicative of her wishywashiness on feminism.

I do not think American conservatism is centred around women's liberation, put it that way. So they recognise we are oppressed for our sex - fine. But how many of them regard that as just part of God's plan for us?

And yet transgenderism is offering the same with the 'twist' that men can self id 'into' our oppression and then speak for us and destroy those rights that do exist.

My 25 year old is currently reading the Handmaid's Tale, for the first time.
I showed him this and he just couldn't get over the irony of Margaret Atwood being a TRA handmaiden.

There is a concentrated Conservative effort right now to frame radical Wokeness as being the same as mainstream, totally bog-standard center-leftness, no doubt. I spent an evening earlier this week reading through my (entirely sane, moral) family members' right wing social media and reading their friends' utter bullshit hysteria over Biden ushering in some sort of QAnon Hieronymus Bosh-type future, and it's pretty clear that they're so shit scared of even moderate leftness that the tactic is working for a portion of Republican voters. (Hell, look at them now - happy to trash their own electoral process and hint at civil war just to avoid Biden for a wee bit longer.)

So trying to seize a "moderate" voice on a social issue with a demographic that traditionally doesn't like them (women) is not unexpected. They are looking for credibility with us, and to try to undermine even moderate Dems and Labour as that's where a chunk of our votes often go. The task for us, as women, is to keep pushing into what they DO actually believe about gender and sex, not just blindly accept their stand against trans overreach.

I do not think American conservatism is centred around women's liberation, put it that way. So they recognise we are oppressed for our sex - fine. But how many of them regard that as just part of God's plan for us?

Agreements on certain factual matters is what you'd expect, unless you are totally ideologically blinkered. Yes. I agree with that and I appreciate @ErrolTheDragon's Venn Diagram.

The deals that worry me is when we let some org like Concerned Women for a Conservative America claim the message (which they recently did w/ women's sports) because then this is framed as only a very conservative women's issue, which it is not. The first order of business, IMO, is to convince liberal women that sex-based rights for women and girls should be US law (very few are). You will not convince left-leaning legislators that conservatives have a trustworthy plan for women.

I think we need this again...

What deals Delphinium?
And what do you think will be the outcome?

Agreements on certain factual matters is what you'd expect, unless you are totally ideologically blinkered.

Well the obvious thing would be to say the Wives were actually trans hence “infertile” aka can’t gestate children. But she’s never going to do that because the optics wouldn’t fit the oppressed narrative.

She could have included transmen. If fertile they could be forced to detransition and become handmaids. But then she would have to admit that TMAW.

I don't understand why Atwood can't see this. How could she write a book about women being oppressed and not understand that it's based on sex, not 'gender identity'?

I've always liked her writing, but Atwood makes no sense whatsoever in this piece. However, like the PP, I do worry that radical feminism has made deals with the fundamentalist Christians. That won't end well.

[quote HaveaStock]The video ‘takedown’ of JKR’s views would have been the Jammidodger one as I remember her referencing it before - she said something like ‘two nice young people explaining it’ or words to that effect. It absolutely illustrates the level of thought and critical analysis she’s given the subject ie. very little. I think she got a bit of shit for not including any trans people in the Handmaids Tale and has been atoning ever since.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Avcp-e4bOs[/quote]
Well the obvious thing would be to say the Wives were actually trans hence “infertile” aka can’t gestate children. But she’s never going to do that because the optics wouldn’t fit the oppressed narrative.

Speaking to authors falls in the same camp as speaking to actors: don’t do it if you want to keep the magic alive. There are some exceptions but even with them your are best avoiding the topic of their book or film. Your imagination fills in the blanks in these and that it best left alone.

Unfortunately Margaret Atwood gives me the same vibes as people who suddenly strike success and will pay lip service to whomever they need to in order to cling on to that success. Their latest book 'The testament' is evidence of this I feel, incredibly disappointing.

I stopped watching the video when the woman described herself as a "cis-gender woman".
No, you are just a woman, so don't try to make the rest of us use compelled speech.

To be clear, Atwood the liberal feminist blames radical feminism (and its union with the new right and fundamentalist Christianity) for Gilead.

Ladies, you brought it on yourselves you know.

Having said that, there is a salient lesson there re thinking about who your friends really are.