Story of Handmaid’s Tale becoming ‘more and more plausible’ – Margaret Atwood

[IwantToRetire]

Award-winning author Margaret Atwood has said the events depicted in her book The Handmaid’s Tale, which tells the story of an authoritarian regime, are becoming “more and more plausible”.

The Canadian writer, 86, published the futuristic novel in 1985 and followed it up with Booker Prize-winning story The Testaments in 2019, both of which inspired the dystopian TV series starring US actress Elisabeth Moss.

In the book, the US is replaced by a theocratic, totalitarian regime called the Republic of Gilead which has subjugated women, many of whom are forced to be natal slaves called handmaids, tasked with rebuilding the species amid worldwide infertility.

Atwood thought the plot was “bonkers” when she first came up with the idea and said “America was the beacon of light” at the time.

Women across the US have worn red cloaks and wings while protesting against the administration of US President Donald Trump, who has taken credit for returning the abortion debate to the agenda and helping overturn the Roe v Wade ruling on abortion rights.

Atwood added: “These kinds of regimes don’t last, partly because they become unsustainable. This particular one seems quite chaotic.

https://www.aol.co.uk/articles/story-handmaid-tale-becoming-more-000100637.html

She's also TWAW so part of the problem really.

She made be a problem in terms of nice liberal lefties being kind, but as the Handmaid's Tale and current US government are about right wing christian fundamentalist, a rather different problem

Except of course women are the victims of these male belief sets.

TWAW aside, yes I agree with her.

We are facing fertility doom. Men’s sperm counts are down what, 70% compared to their grandfathers? I know multiple women doing IVF and out of 120 girls I went to school with, only a quarter are mothers and we are now 33.

It’s not a value judgement on the choices of individuals, but eventually I assume governments will ‘take charge’ and I can see something like this unfolding as it collides with the sudden reprisal of Christianity, right wing politics and drive toward ‘traditional values’,

She’s not TWAW. But you know this.

I agree, @IwantToRetire, piecing the current narratives and ideologies together in the US together tells an alarming story.

She’s not TWAW. But you know this.

Margaret Atwood signed the open letter stating that TWAW.

Quote from the letter:

"We want to do our part to help shape the curve of history toward justice and fairness,” they write. “To that end, we say: non-binary people are non-binary, trans women are women, trans men are men, trans rights are human rights."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/09/stephen-king-margaret-atwood-roxane-gay-champion-trans-rights-open-letter-jk-rowling

She wrote the fucking book, signed off on the films. Gave out the ideas. Now surprised some men thought it was a good idea.

She’s an intelligent woman, yes? She recognises that transwomen are still biologically male. The definition she is using here is that they are socially women and should be treated as such. (And for the record, I don’t agree with this.)

That's absolute nonsense however.

What does being 'socially women' mean? There's only one way to be a woman and that's biological.

I agree with her (on this, not on TWAW). I think surrogacy links into this too, more and more rich and famous women are choosing surrogates rather than ‘ruin’ their body or careers with the inconvenience of bearing children, almost like it’s beneath them. I don’t think we’ll get to a point of forced childbearing like the handmaid’s tale but I think society is creeping towards a kind of social version where poorer women’s bodies are commodified for women (or gay men) who are unwilling or unable to bear children themselves.

I agree surragacy is the real problem and that is part of the missuse of science generally. See also the growth of eugenics. It's not a religious issue it's a scientific one.

Stupid.

The thing about The Handmaid's Tale is that real fundamentalist Christians are, you know, quite keen on monogamy.

The departure from that is well enough justified in the book, but requires a very specific scenario (takeover by minority sect + incredible fertility crisis). It isn't something US society just edges towards over time, and doesn't match real-world conditions in any meaningful way.

Atwood seems - and I have thought this about her for a while - a bit too keen to blow her own trumpet as some sort of prophetic voice, presumably in an attempt to sell more copies. But books of this type don't have to be in danger of literally coming true to have something interesting to say.

TWAW and forced birthing are two sides of the same coin. Both are anti-women ideologies.

All the awful things that happen in the book were drawn from real life.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/c7bbe6fc-f452-4015-acdb-719ff8e5d389

Why are we not surprised that right wing women are trying to smear Atwood because of their own politics. Nauseating.

I’m not going to derail the thread, and that will happen if I answer this question. You’ll have to ask Margaret Atwood.

Women like Atwood seem to think the only threat to women comes from the Right. They are deluded in that way when surrogacy, TWAW and ‘sex work’ are all deeply driven by lefty liberal movements. Those are just as dangerous for women as more extreme conservative ideologies. I suspect Atwood doesn’t really care about women all that much. She just enjoys the admiration her writing has earned her and wants to keep selling books. Outside her writing, she doesn’t really seem to stand for anything very interesting.

Distinction is meaningless, nobody actually ever believed that humans can change sex. She's happy to strip women of their rights in the service of the idea that woman's biological reality is nothing but a figment of the male imagination.

There is no way to answer that question, without coming across as utterly ridiculous, no matter who does it. As im sure you are well aware.

Margaret Atwood is a great fiction writer. She is also a brilliant self-publicist, has zero self awareness and an ego the size of Canada. She will do anything - including bullshit like this - to stay in the news, stay popular with the literary establishment and in with the pre-approved thoughts of Right People.

She literally has said for the past 40 years that everything she wrote in Handmaid's Tale had already happened somewhere in the world. So why she is here saying it 'might happen'? It's already happened Maggie - you said so.

This is a great blog about her hypocrisy and vanity. https://discordiareview.substack.com/p/the-handmaids-tale-sucks

Also see Kathleen Stock on Atwood
https://unherd.com/2025/11/what-margaret-atwood-got-wrong/

Also, she's a writer of potboiler melodramas. Yes a talented and successful one but thinking she is a public intellectual or a has some special claim to being taken more seriously than Suzanne Collins or Susan Lewis is weird.

Kathleen Stock and Julie Bindel were very amusing and on the nose recently about Atwood's tendency to present herself as a prophet like this - but that actually, it's not that governments are going to do this, the problem is more that women themselves are encouraged on an individual, financial level to rent out their wombs.

Nope. If I answer - and keep in mind, it won’t be my personal opinion - I’ll be peppered endlessly with aggressive questions. And when you say it’s “utterly ridiculous” before having even read it is a point in case. Unnecessary.

Before having read what?

Why don't you just post a link to where she explains herself?

No it will be ridiculous because being a woman is fundamentally a biological state.

Any attempt to define woman by any other means, without recourse to biology is a pointless/daft thing to do. You refuse to wade into a definition because you 100% know that.

Its okay to call out our heroes/ heroines by the way. In jumping on the TWAW bandwagon, Atwood has shown us who she is. Yes that's very disappointing, but life can be like that.