Margaret Atwood

“In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”

So said Margaret Atwood according to The Guardian www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/margaret-atwood-feminist-backlash-metoo

Nuance is dead. We can’t protect women without throwing transwomen to the wolves. If we try to protect women only spaces then we are figuratively sending transwomen to death according to the TRAs. So women have to be sacrificed instead. We can’t allow men to claim those spaces and protect women. We can’t allow transwomen to speak for women because they don’t have the experiences that women do. The notion of womanhood is being eradicated.
We know this and can’t say it outside these safe spaces. Anyone who speaks up is labelled and cancelled, subject to death threats and disgusting abuse. We are not allowed to think, discuss or question the trans dogma.
It is sickening and that is why I am here.

I suspect, having read most of her output bar the poetry, that she also has a masochistic streak and not only a fascination with but a kind of odd reverence for male violence

Agreed- although I would have said sadistic streak.

..... maybe she is hurriedly googling JKRowling and reading her essay....

I'm checking regularly! No recanting so far!

I'm waiting around 'cos I'll hear it here first, whatever happens.

I'm amazed she hasn't recanted yet.

Try this, Whisky:

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47789/marrying-the-hangman

It was JKR that really turned me around, and I think that must have been when I discovered you guys. And FWIW this board always felt like a safe space for someone who was really very ignorant about the whole issue.

I probably read the wrong stuff. The poems she includes in her novels (such as eco-psalms in The Year of the Flood) is sheer doggerel and I wasn't at all sure that we were intended to view it as such.

Her poetry is good. I prefer it to her novels, tbh.

She is a fine novelist (or was- everything from the dreadful Madaddam onwards has been pretty crap tbh) but she never seems to think through anything she says, yet happily takes fees for badly-written op-eds on myriad subjects.

I suspect, having read most of her output bar the poetry, that she also has a masochistic streak and not only a fascination with but a kind of odd reverence for male violence.

So, I suspect she is poking this hornet's nest quite deliberately.

It's rather like this.

I have a friend who is a trans rights activist and she keeps getting distressed because if she says the wrong thing , or asks a controversial question, she gets called a t and is told to re-educate herself until she’s a better ally (this is coming from her trans friends).*

I think that allyship in the TRA movement tends to attract the kind of women who cling to violent men and abusive relationships. At some level, they believe that they deserve the abuse because they just aren't worthy of being treated decently, so they just keep whimpering out apologies and begging not to be beaten too violently.

www.spiked-online.com/2021/10/21/were-all-terfs-now/

I know that this will seem spurned if she recants but coolers need to know there is a community ready to acknowledge and receive them.

This is so important. I bet a lot of people on here are only here because they had a "This is stupid" moment and found other people who thought the same and told them "you aren't crazy, we agree with you and will support you."

I feel bad for her because by quoting the article and agreeing with its precepts, but then using the word TERF as a slur, she's going to end up pissing off both sides.

www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/19659587.issue-day-acclaimed-author-atwood-online-storm-word-woman/

She retweeted an article about clownfish to prove that sex in humans isn't immutable?

She must realise the problem with that. I'm guessing, like other posters, that she was caught up in an ideology that she thought was merely supportive but harmless, and now it turns out to be the opposite.

And still, she fails to repent.

Also a mention of MA by Janice Turner today:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d1993982-31dc-11ec-afd6-aa3ee2eb8a34?shareToken=e46c2a8bb6b859de6c8e960458983790

In The Times today

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/573b0fe8-31ec-11ec-afd6-aa3ee2eb8a34?shareToken=efa6196329a3c88c902cfbb083c099cc

The real question for me is who is Margaret Atwood?

Is she Aunt Lydia? - Going along with it because shes not in the 'at risk' group of rape/ intimidation in a womens prison/ refuge/ public toilet etc. and wants to retain and protect her social status as best she can.

Is she Serena? - An advocate for the regime. She's powerful, ambitious, well educated and seemingly naive to the fact she's not exempt from her own erasure; deep down knows but chooses to protect their ego from the rigorous unpicking this examination would require.

Or is she Janine? Battered down and damaged with PTSD to the point she lives in her own chaotic reality. Swaying between modes of angst ridden dissidence and a strange infantilised self preservation mode.
Permanently living in a state of fear and as such has settled into going the route of least resistance.

Or is she the news printers hung pre-season who we sadly have no name for? She saw it coming, thought its irreversible and tried to hide in a cellar. Plucked up the courage to print and distribute a copy of the news. Flung their hands up and said 'no no read it, its not how you think, not my writing, I/They are not THE dissidents etc.' Charged and bailed, now in hiding again.