{"id":6469,"date":"2017-04-28T07:55:14","date_gmt":"2017-04-28T13:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=6469"},"modified":"2017-05-02T20:46:47","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T02:46:47","slug":"handmaids-cautionary-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/04\/handmaids-cautionary-tale.html","title":{"rendered":"The Handmaid’s cautionary tale . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AWomen_in_burqa_with_their_children_in_Herat%2C_Afghanistan.jpg;<\/p>\n

is, apparently, that we are at risk of becoming a slightly weird version of fundamentalist Islam.<\/p>\n

OK, that\u2019s not really what this post is about, but I had to at least say it: \u00a0all the hand-wringing that The Handmaid\u2019s Tale is \u201ceerily timely\u201d (a quote from a review that appears repeatedly as an ad in my, and probably your, twitter feed) themselves seem eerily out of place in that they ignore the fact that the components of Atwood\u2019s dystopia are found in the present-day Islamic world, from the sex slaves of ISIS to the male-guardian requirement of Saudi Arabia to the continued subjugation and exclusion from education of girls in much of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

The only part of her premise that I find particularly interesting is the question, \u201cwhat would happen to society if infertility skyrocketed?\u201d \u00a0Now, the way she answered it, that somehow the women in power\/married to men in power were all infertile, and only the underclasses were fertile, is also an odd plot device, but it would be disruptive to society in a pretty major way \u2014 though in her envisioned environmental catastrophe, it\u2019s more likely that the majority of the population would have highly diminished fertility, rather than there being two classes of fertile and infertile.<\/p>\n

But of course, Atwood\u2019s objective is not to warn others of the perils of what she imagines to be our path to theocracy. \u00a0Or, at any rate, that\u2019s now how her book is perceived. \u00a0Rather, its function seems to be to give comfort to feminist-activists, to assure them that their cause is just because The Enemy is indeed so evil that they\u2019re just one step away from full-on theocracy, and that their opponents are indeed so vile that, if they could\u00a0manage to gain total power, they would subjugate women in hideous ways.<\/p>\n

Which is, of course, why they don\u2019t see the parallels to Islamic societies; that\u2019s not where their attention is. \u00a0It\u2019s directed at their political opponents. \u00a0(It\u2019s like the old Cub Scout skit of someone looking for a lost item by the streetlight \u201cbecause that\u2019s where the light is.\u201d) \u00a0The status of women elsewhere isn\u2019t a part of their story, their fight, and a novel about those other women wouldn\u2019t serve the same purpose of affirming the rightness of their own cause.<\/p>\n

And what about other dystopias?<\/p>\n

Are they warnings, or are they affirmations?<\/p>\n

George Orwell wrote 1984<\/a><\/em> in response to his fear that English socialism could one day become as totalitarian, as the Soviet Union already was. \u00a0There\u2019s a lot of content in the novel that\u2019s rich for exploration, including Newspeak and the idea that the rulers were changing the very language itself so as to prevent the formation of anti-government thoughts. \u00a0But I don\u2019t think anyone has ever had the self-awareness to perceive that Orwell\u2019s caution applies to their own speech and actions, just their political opponents.<\/p>\n

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World<\/a><\/em> even earlier, and, while in many ways it seems a more accurate forecast of the world to come, with its conception of a populace that\u2019s perpetually content (is pot taking on the role of soma in Huxley\u2019s world? \u00a0is the hook-up culture Brave New Worldian?), Wikipedia suggests that there was no particular impetus to his writing than that he thought it was an interesting set of ideas to work out.<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, as Wikipedia<\/a> relates,<\/p>\n

Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:<\/p>\n

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny \u201cfailed to take into account man\u2019s almost infinite appetite for distractions.\u201d In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.<\/p>\n

Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article \u201cWhy Americans Are Not Taught History\u201d:<\/p>\n

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression \u201cYou\u2019re history\u201d as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell\u2019s was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley \u2026 rightly foresaw that any such regime could break because it could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(See the link for its internal links and footnotes.)<\/p>\n

More recent is Suzanne Collin\u2019s Hunger Games<\/a> trilogy, about which she has explicitly said that she drew inspiration from American reality television, and about which others have claimed similarities. \u00a0Ironically, though, at the time, critics were drawing connections between reality TV as it existed at the time, and the Hunger Games competition, in order to criticize reality TV-watching, but the idea of citizens of the Capitol joyfully watching the suffering of others really seems to have, in fact, foretold the newest iteration of public facebook postings of horrific crimes \u2014 though, to be sure, I can\u2019t say that I recall any reports of these posts being viewed and shared by an enthusiastic audience, so much as the ultimate horror when they\u2019re reported in the news.<\/p>\n

So, readers, this is where I start my workday and ask you: \u00a0what dystopias speak to you? \u00a0And are they warnings or affirmations?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AWomen_in_burqa_with_their_children_in_Herat%2C_Afghanistan.jpg; By Arnesen (Woman and Children) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

is, apparently, that we are at risk of becoming a slightly weird version of fundamentalist Islam. OK, that\u2019s not really what this post is about, but I had to at least say it: \u00a0all the hand-wringing that The Handmaid\u2019s Tale is \u201ceerily timely\u201d (a quote from a review that appears repeatedly as an ad in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6470,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[616,571,615],"class_list":["post-6469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dystopias","tag-feminism","tag-the-handmaids-tale"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Handmaid's cautionary tale . . .<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"is, apparently, that we are at risk of becoming a slightly weird version of fundamentalist Islam. 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