The Handmaid's Tale

I think defining more/less damaged is a very slippery one. June perhaps has endured more trauma in connection with her children which Moira has not. But she seems to have used that to temper her resilience to a terrifying level. I think June is unbreakable. She is verging on nihilism maybe?
I am quite enjoying in season 4 the genesis of a new rebellion!

I agree Beamur, there is no-one she can connect with except perhaps as you say Emily. The group therapy sessions were interesting, interesting in how June responded to them and what Moira was trying to achieve there. Is June more damaged than Moira? I do wonder if there can be any meaningful recovery for June and Emily but I am really glad to see that Emily has been able to reconnect more with her family. It was interesting too to see the mini story of the child struggling to adjust and how Rita was able to connect with him.

Interesting too what other posters were saying about the lack of any woman in a position of power and influence in Gilead. I agree that it would likely make little difference. What did Margaret Thatcher achieve for women’s rights or Queen Elizabeth 1st? Any woman who makes it is hobbled by the structures around her so wouldn’t be able to achieve much if she wanted to. Look at Joseph who sort of seems to want to improve things and even he as a man and a commander must tread carefully. The Aunts have some power but only what they are given. When I think of the Aunts the Zimbardo prison experiment comes to mind, and also Milgram (I think) who did the electric shock experiments, in fact obstetric violence and the bullying culture present on some maternity wards committed by midwives comes to mind too. Systems and structures can bring out the worst and perhaps also the best in those humans who must operate within them. All a bit Montessori, I do think that she was on to something.

I've been watching this recently. Having resisted for a bit, I have caught up!
Elisabeth Moss is mesmerising. I am finding June outside of Gilead a fascinating character. She has just got angrier.
I think she's feeling the lack of solidarity that the core of rebellious handmaids had and that sense of purpose has shifted. Hardly anyone really understands her. Only maybe Emily. Luke doesn't get it and neither does Moira.

I've watched through season (series) 4. I see a clear message that within any kind of official system, when seeking justice within an established framework, June is (and feminists, or people seeking fair treatment for women, are) limited not just by the fact that most of the power players are men, but even more so by the fact that the system relies on structural inequality between men and women (among other inequalities).

Just adding in individual women in positions of power isn't a game changer. Agent Mark Tuello could be replaced with a woman, the Canadian PM could be a woman (hey, Kim Campbell lasted four months!), the international tribunal hearing Fred Waterford's self-defense could be packed with women, and patriarchy and misogyny could still remain unchecked. Look at Scotland or Germany or New Zealand in real life. Gilead is especially and obviously bad because it removes almost all options for any individual women who might thrive in Canada or old-style USA. We see that with Lydia and Serena, who in their pre-Gilead lives did better than the men around them. But those less-bad systems aren't great (fair, equal, equitable, egalitarian) for women either.

Sometimes it even seems like individual women in power positions can make the problem of ingrained misogyny worse, because the societal expectations of women are different from those of men. See the last UK Labour leadership contest, where all of the women candidates for Leader and Deputy Leader were automatically expected to (and did) sign a misogynistic pledge while men like Ian Murray and Richard Burgon were politely invited to discuss the same pledge, and never did sign it (nor did Keir Starmer).

Then again, I've seen no sign that any of the woman candidates resisted, except for the observation that the pledge was defamatory from Emily Thornberry, who signed it anyway and then dropped out of the race. But we see what happens when a woman politician DOES resist that kind of institutional (and social, and cultural) misogyny - see Carmen Calvo, Rosie Duffield, Joanna Cherry, Joan MacAlpine. Who'd volunteer for that treatment? What's been the blowback for Murray, Burgon, Starmer? Not saying there was none - we've seen some severe blowback for men too, like Graham Linehan, and I know David TC Davies was routinely harrassed - but in politics it seems typically less crippling for men than for women.

Sorry, back to THT - in S2, when the Mexican delegation came to Gilead to negotiate to rent their own handmaids, some of the members of the delegation were woman, and one appeared to have sympathy for June specifically - but nothing changed. The misogyny of disregarding woman, of expecting women to be collateral damage, is so ingrained in the culture that it replicates itself, even if it's not actively pushed top-down.

As for Atwood, I wonder how much she was impacted by her own "bad feminist" moment, when she defended Steven Galloway, the Canadian writer and professor and once head of the Creative Writing program at UBC who was accused of sexual harrassment and sexual assault by a student who'd been in a relationship with him for two years (he said consensual relationship, she said grooming and coercion). Atwood's point back then wasn't that Galloway was innocent, just that the case was mishandled (it was dealt with as an internal matter by the university, and Galloway wasn't given certain rights he would have been in a criminal case in a Canadian court, such as knowing in advance what he was accused of doing). She was hounded for it (and I don't mean harsh but fair and reasoned criticism, I mean harrassment and attempted silencing); if anyone's curious, she writes about it here: www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/

Atwood's comments on JK Rowling were ignorant - whatever you think about erasing the legal distinction between men and women, it should be possible to express those thoughts without promoting and normalising rape cuture. But I don't even get the sense from Atwood that she even knows what's going on in the UK and has a reasoned opinion about it, just that she doesn't want to be hounded again. Can't blame her on an individual level, I guess - it just renews my respect for the few brave people (many of them here) who DO tell the truth. Imagine if we all did?

Yes the agent, and Joseph but I sometimes question even Luke and Nick. The structural power imbalance seems to make it impossible for a man and a woman to relate to each other in a genuinely healthy way.

I have known all along how wonderfully transformative the ladies changing room at the gym is. I have tried to brief the other women but they have little idea or interest in what I'm talking about.
Just one....even small...dangling penis would change all that in a microsecond. This thought peaked me several years ago.

JackieWeaversZoomAc I absolutely agree with you about women’s changing rooms too and being comfortable together as women of all ages and body types. I found it really helped me with body image issues when I was younger to be in such spaces. I do believe that many of us need these women only spaces, they can often be restful and supportive even when that isn’t their intended purpose.

To have this safe space with all these different female bodies and seeing women of all ages, shapes and sizes be so very comfortable with themselves and others in this shared female space - well it did more for me and improving my own body issue stuff than any amount of therapy ever did.

Womens shared spaces, language and experiences really really matter.

Thanks for the explanation - all makes sense now. (I think I was just being spectacularly thick last night

Yes Cattenberg, I feel that way too. I also agree with EdgeOfACoin about the harms of gender neutral language, wow how striking to see that change during the course of your antenatal classes.

I recently heard about the work of a Jungian analyst on a podcast (this Jungian life), I think his name was Brian Feldman, he worked with mothers who were struggling to adjust to motherhood by means of sharing stories about archetypal ideas of motherhood the aim being giving them meaning and significance in their roles as mothers. Apparently his results were very positive, the storytelling was inspiring and supportive to these mothers. As I was listening to this it made me think of the psychological impact on us of denying motherhood has any meaning or significance, of actually denying it exists at all in any way distinct from “parenthood”. In fact the same could be said for fathers. They lose their distinct role in the child’s life too.

This is also what many of the birth and breastfeeding groups are losing, they perhaps underestimate how much of their support was about the celebration of motherhood, and the meaning and purpose that gave to those attending their groups. That belief in the significance of your role in your child’s life can be something which really helps you through all the daily challenges of mothering. Mothers matter, but the new paradigm seems to be that we don’t, now we are just another component in a production line. I can see why some people believe the end goal and driving force behind these changes is transhumanism or that the human body and the human family is the final frontier of capitalism.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I keep noticing attempts to legally and or culturally sever pregnancy from motherhood. And it worries me, because I don’t think this is in the best interest of mothers or their babies.

Yes, I attended antenatal classes recently. Towards the end of the course, I noticed that literature was changed to remove the word 'mother' and replaced with 'birthing parent'. So whereas at the start of the course we were given a course outline that said something like 'in the last session mothers and birth partners will be placed in separate groups', by the time it actually came to the last session, the literature had been re-written to say 'birthing parents and birth partners will be placed in separate groups'.

Of course I was furious and made my feelings known on the feedback form, but there is definitely a push to de-couple the concepts of women and mothers from biology. As though the reproductive roles of the sexes are interchangeable.

And it worries me, because I don’t think this is in the best interest of mothers or their babies. yes

I can’t watch The Handmaid’s Tale without thinking of commercial surrogacy and those horrible surrogacy contracts in some US states which erode the surrogate mother’s rights, sometimes using the threat of financial ruin to enforce compliance.

I’m also alarmed by recent attempts in the UK to change the legal definitions of “mother” and “father”. This would supposedly be kind and trans-inclusive, but it could also challenge a birth mother’s automatic parental responsibility for her child.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I keep noticing attempts to legally and or culturally sever pregnancy from motherhood. And it worries me, because I don’t think this is in the best interest of mothers or their babies.

Anyway I don’t want to get sidetracked from discussing the series.

herewegogc I agree with your observation absolutely it is very much the case that June remains 100% dependent on men to achieve her objectives and on “handling” those men. It is no surprise that she is angry. The power structures remain in place but some men are either finding their aims align with June’s or I don’t know they are indulging her because they can and it amuses them or perhaps using her, playing games that involve using her to hurt their enemies.

The book is about women having their rights removed. In Atwood's current world view, all those women would have to do would be to say 'I am a man', and they could have rights again.

If Atwood's world view was correct, a dystopian society like in the Handmaid's tale couldn't exist, because everyone would just opt into the dominant sex (gender) class. Nobody would choose to be a woman. The fact that women in such societies can't do this shows that Atwood's viewpoint of TWAW and TMAM is a fiction.

Atwood believes that men can become women.

That would imply that sex is of no consequence and that there is no difference between men and women.

The world she created in Gilead was entirely based on sex differences and power imbalance between the sexes, men oppressing women. None of the handmaids had the option of identifying as men. In Gilead men use their strength and size to force women into reproductive and domestic slavery. So it is a bit odd that what she appeared to understand in 1985 she apparently has no grasp of in 2021. Now she seems to think that sex is irrelevant and the handmaids should have just identified as commanders, if they didn’t like their identity as handmaids so probably they were really happy as handmaids after all

Sorry - you'll have to explain that a bit more. I really don't understand what you mean.

"People wonder how she can be when, in the book, it seems as if she understands that oppression of women is related to their biological, reproductive role."

What do you mean by this? Sorry to be dense, but I really don't understand you!

But she's always been kind of a twit.

I don't understand the point that you're all trying to make about Margaret Attwood - genuinely. She wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1985.

What's the issue? (I really mean this as a genuine question!)

But she's always been kind of a twit.