Brilliant Margaret Atwood memoir review

Horoscopes have been respected by hundreds of millions of people across Asia for millennia, psychology was invented in Europe a century and a half ago.

Both of them have little if anything to do with science.

Read the early chapters of Wild Swans for that, and imagine having to crush your own small daughter’s feet for months on end because the alternative could be destitution, or indeed prostitution and an early death.

Excellent post @PermanentTemporary

In my professional life, I am primarily interested in the ways in which women have historically worked within the constraints of their culture, and the ways that they also get under the radar, or resist. Sometimes, in what appear to be very ordinary ways (to us) - simply writing or speaking in public.

Raymond Williams is goof on this - the way that when there's hegemonic power, there's always resistance. I look for women's quiet resistance ...

Exactly, this.

Thank you Amarillys, putting Life Before Man on my list.

Loving this. The cited study said "women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations."

So polite, sociable men who are conscientious and worry about things ... are women?

It also said the differences emerged in the male profiles, the female ones were consistent. This would mean there was a higher proportion of polite, sociable, conscientious, concerned men in the more economically deprived societies with poor education and healthcare. Somebody should go tell them all they're lady-gendered 😂

It's an interesting review. I'm an "old" Atwood fan, she was possibly my favourite fiction author up til "Alias Grace" and then I started to lose interest in her later books. Her older books are still among my favourites and to my mind even a "bad" Atwood is still better than most authors' best.

I loved "The Handmaid's Tale" mainly for the language. "Waste not, want not, the saying goes. I have not been wasted. Why do I want?" still sends shivers up my spine. "The Handmaid's Tale" was not prescient, except in the sense that what you've seen before you will probably see again. What Atwood said at the time was that everything in it as based on reality in some part of the world.

he "prescient" bit that does resonate with me now is how trans ideology crept up on us while I - a feminist who thought the job was mostly done and as a busy mother - was looking the other way and not paying attention. By the time I realised we had a rape by another patient in a supposedly women's hospital ward, trans ideology was throughly embedded in UK society (and elsewhere) and it was very late indeed - nearly too late. But not quite.

One book that writers tend to ignore (and Kathleen Stock has ignored it too) is my favourite "Life Before Man". It's a written in a quasi-scientific objective style but it has profound psychological insight throughout including the damage done in three different childhoods. It's presented through characters who don't have insight themsleves and the psychological theories they do know aren't much use. It also has a fascinating source and precursor to the Aunts, Elizabeth's appalling Auntie Muriel. And in the end it is a redemption story when Elizabeth unwillingly recognises Auntie Muriel's humanity and the story recognises the courage it takes just to keep going. "She has built a dwelling above the abyss but where else was there to build it? So far, it stands".

So I disagree that Atwood is obtuse about humans. She is very sharp about humans. Her way of describing people from the outside and asking hard questions about them and trying to imagine the answers is psychologically insightful. That's not the same as getting everything right in real life. It's not the same as using psychological theories either - in fact one of the things I like best is that she leaves theory behind and asks "what do these people THINK? what would these people DO?"

Anyway, interesting review, and thanks for sharing @hholiday The memoir is going on my Christmas list!

That is an excellent list @totalrocket
I'm not trying to police the thread but I think it deserves a thread of its own.
There's a lot to unpick here.

Please do start one! 🙏

Also a top post. Very comprehensive!

I just scroll by certain posts now. IMO, the posts just say the same thing over and over on repeat so once you’ve read a few, you’ve read them all. Plus they never engage or respond to substantive questions.

Edited to add: @totalrocket you won’t get clear answers to those questions.

There is now decades of research (in the wake of second wave feminism) demonstrating the power of socialisation & conditioning. Gramsci & Althusser offer a nuanced Marxist view of this; psychobiologists and those looking at child development also note this. For example, the research about the ways that people treat girl and boy babies differently, from in utero onward.

We are social beings; nature and nurture form us, and our behaviour is always in relation to the social constraints & norms - even if we don't realise this, or try deliberately to resist.

Women and girls are subject to really strong and often coercive socialisation - John Stuart & Harriet Taylor Mill pinned this back in the 1860s in The Subjection of Women. It's worth a read.

Haven't rtft yet but wanted to say this is an excellent post.

I’m not wanting to feed any troll and don’t want to derail the thread. When I see the likes of Margaret Atwood I again stop to reconfirm my understanding of the trans debate. Can I just clarify- is this your understanding of the pro trans debate? Or am I missing something.

1. Trans people are people, it’s no skin off woman or society’s nose to be kind to their wishes.
2. Let trans woman in the female spaces such as bathrooms or hospital spaces because they are because of - of a new unspecified science/ no science at all/ a new development of societal understanding, a previously unknown type of woman? So therefore trans women are women.
3. Women or others are simply transphobic for wanting to retain single sex spaces and for not wanting trans women in their refuges, for example. Or if not transphobic, it’s a risk that just needs to be accepted because hitherto cross dressers used the bathrooms forever anyway. Collateral damage.
4. That society can’t spot a trans person a mile off so what’s the problem and to say so is transphobic.
5. Trans men can take their chances in the men’s because that’s their choice. Trans men aren’t part of this argument.
6. Third spaces are invalidating and othering so the campaign for them is undesirable.
7. Men are more of a scary / definable risk to trans women than women, therefore it is risking their harm not to allow them in women’s spaces under the protection of women.
8. Dangerous men who are proporting to be transwomen and who go on to hurt women are such a tiny proportion it’s irrelevant to the argument. Collateral damage.
9. That challenging any of the above is hurtful and therefore harmful due to the heavy load and fragile health trans people carry because of being trans in a transphobic society and they’re likely to self harm.
10. That the fear of women is this debate is due to transphobia and doesn’t risk them physical harm and if it does then it’s collateral damage.
11. The trans rights spoke about for example is the right to all of the above? It’s not a specific right or law which is is sought?

Is that it? For clarity- I don’t agree with the above but I do want to understand the full scope of the counter argument.

Sorry, OP, thanks for posting this. I wouldn't have seen it otherwise and I love both Kathleen Stock's writing and The Handmaid's Tale (however differently I think to the author).

Let's be very clear about your original contention:

Am I correct in thinking that you are saying that if "women exhibit gendered typical behaviours" this means men who exhibit the same behaviours can, on that basis, be classed as women?

Um, it's actually Sodha that didn't provide evidence…

I got one paragraph into a long early post on this thread, clocked some sexist patronising shite and scrolled back up to the username. Yep, that tracks.

I've now got through this thread in record time because a significant proportion of the posts can be ignored, but it's a shame to miss a discussion on an interesting topic so I'd add my pleas to everyone suggesting letting the sealion continue clapping and arfing in his own wee corner.

I love HMT and the Testaments was excellent on Aunt Lydia's backstory. Which surprised me, because Atwood herself is a bit of a literary Aunt Lydia these days (ref the dig about the Harry Potter store).

I guess if I'd had half a century of people hailing me as a visionary and genius I'd have got pretty smug, too. But it's a real shame.

Gender characteristics in socially equal countries are even wider apart eh? To (mis)quote Harry Enfield, “Sophistication? I’ve BEEN to Sweden,”

How's (ha!) this for facts - no one can change sex, so men will always remain men no matter what, and the law says they should stay out of women's single sex spaces etc.

Gender, presentation etc? It's all bullshit. Sex matters, get over it!

God reading through that New Socialist letter arguing against Sodha’s article is a litany of lightly evidenced ‘associations’ and distortions.

Translation:

These facts are hurting my feelings…

How does one measure cultural pressures? Sociologists like to use the most egalitarian countries as a comparator & it appears from their observations that sex differences are even larger in Nordic countries who are amongst the most egalitarian in the world. And last I heard, the women's fashion industry is still thriving there.

"The more gender equal a society is, the more similar men and women will be, adopting more similar interests, personality traits and behavioural patterns. Or so many people seem to believe.
Statements like this might sound like truisms, but science shows reality may be more complicated.
Several studies have found that some psychological sex differences, such as those in personality, are larger in more gender-equal countries. The same goes for countries that are more educated, prosperous and otherwise have better living conditions. This has become known as the gender-equality paradox."

https://theconversation.com/sex-differences-dont-disappear-as-a-countrys-equality-develops-sometimes-they-become-stronger-222932

Please don't feed the troll. It's insatiable.

Oh dear seems Sonia got caught out making unsubstantiated claims:

"The Observer recently published an opinion piece by Sonia Sodha on the challenge of preventing violence against women who sell sex. The author argued for the criminalisation of the purchase of sex, often known as the Nordic model.
This article contained a number of unsubstantiated claims regarding the decriminalisation of sex work, in particular that decriminalisation increases the overall extent of prostitution in a country without decreasing its harms. In reality, evidence from New Zealand, where prostitution was decriminalised in 2003, shows that sex workers are now more able to address violence and are better able to protect their health; the New Zealand government concluded that decriminalisation had not increased the size of the industry. These are some of the reasons why international organisations like the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS advocate for the full decriminalisation of sex work, not the Nordic model."

https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/letter-response-sonia-sodhas-observer-article/

Also it's not just about the women engaging in prostitution. It harms other women and girls both in those areas and in society as a whole.

To engage with Hows is to play chess with a pigeon. The pigeon will knock over all the pieces, shit on the board and declare itself winner 🙄