The Handmaid's Tale

[InkyGirl]

So, I just finished The Handmaid's Tale after hearing it talked about on the old board. I was creeped out by how similar to some of our fundies the story was; the woman's place, 'it's for your protection', 'don't lead our brothers astray'; all in all - scary stuff.

In the book it talks about an attack on all government officials that lead to the great social change that leads to the story; what I was wondering is what would it take for the fundies to have complete control? Would the government have to be completely wiped out? Or could it happen over time?

For those who haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. I wish I could slip it to some of our fundies - however I don't want to give them any ideas.

[sparrow]

Honestly, I feel like that's what they're working on by having so many kids: outnumbering the opposition. ::shudders::

[Sola]

Honestly, I feel like that's what they're working on by having so many kids: outnumbering the opposition. ::shudders::

It is, in some cases. I read a thread ages ago on Rapture Ready. They were comparing how many children they had and one woman was complaining that she wasn't getting pregnant soon enough. She said that Christians have a duty to have many children to 'out-breed' Muslims and that if all Christians had big families soon they would outnumber Muslims. Worst thing was she was entirely serious and everyone else on the thread agreed with her.

[ElphabaGalinda]

i don't think fundies will have the power to wipe out the government all at once. They'd do it so gradually people really wouldn't notice until it's too late. Remember how it happened gradually in The Handmaid's Tale, beginning I believe with removing womens' access to bank accounts? And in the story, they didn't really see that as a big deal. I'm thinking it could happen if it was about 50 times more gradual than that...and that's scary. Sometimes it feels like it's already happening, especially with several new laws that have passed in regards to women seeking abortions being treated as children. That was a scary book for me because it didn't strike me as impossible.

[dormouse]

I love that book! I read it after hearing about it on the old forum as well, finished it last May 2nd, and joked on my Facebook status that I was reading it to "prepare for Stephen Harper to be elected Prime Minister with majority"... and in it's exactly what happened that evening.

I'd rather think that it seems to us like there are a lot more fundies than there really is, because, well, we kind of made a hobby out of watching them. But I've read somewhere that there are only 100,000 fundamentalist families in the US. Even if they each had as many children as the Duggars, that's not nearly enough to outbreed the regular Christians, atheists, and other religions for many more generations. So yes it could happen, but a lot more gradually than in the book.

Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic stories are all possible in some way. I've read Oryx & Crake and The Year of the Flood, and that might very well be the world our grand-children and great-grandchildren will live in.

[bananacat]

Honestly, I feel like that's what they're working on by having so many kids: outnumbering the opposition. ::shudders::

Well it's easy to feel this way because they have explicitly stated that this is exactly their purpose. Their only flaw in the plan is that their lifestyle has a high turnover rate and most of their kids will not follow in their footsteps, especially the overworked daughters.

[luckylassie]

I didn't read the entire thing but what I gathered from the book was that procreation was so important that if you were not a pregnant, reproducing, and fertile female then you were of no use and basically ignored and put away.

[browngrl]

I didn't read the entire thing but what I gathered from the book was that procreation was so important that if you were not a pregnant, reproducing, and fertile female then you were of no use and basically ignored and put away.

No, the book is to show the dangers of this kind of thinking. Margret Atwood is an excellent writer and she is not a fundie. Her post apocalypic books are a warning not an endorsement.

[luckylassie]

I was just saying that the book showed that procreation was elevated to such a high priority. Sorry if it came out the wrong way. I like Margret Atwood.

[xDreamerx]

I think Margaret Atwood is kind of awful, but I did like this book. I read it in high school. It was part of our English reading. It's not so much the idea of the fundie life being carried on that scares me, it's the fact that a lot of their beliefs are shared, at least to some degree, by the larger Christian right which has been mainstreamed more and more in American politics.

[deborahlynn1979]

I finally read that book earlier this year and loved. every. second. of. it. Even the ambiguous ending! It's Saturday, so I don't have my thinking cap on properly and can't think of anything really deep to say about it, but I could totally imagine that future happening in our country if the Teabaggers get their way.

[GenerationCedarchip]

I think Margaret Atwood is kind of awful, but I did like this book. I read it in high school. It was part of our English reading. It's not so much the idea of the fundie life being carried on that scares me, it's the fact that a lot of their beliefs are shared, at least to some degree, by the larger Christian right which has been mainstreamed more and more in American politics.

Yes - this. There may not be that many hardcore fundie families, but the ranks of the fundie lites have been growing quickly. I read an article talking about how this is fed both by disaffected mainstreamers and by escaped fundies. A lot of those folks will side with the fundies on political issues at least to an extent. If the fundies are smart enough to move gradually(so as not to scare fundie lites and more moderate/traditional parts of the mainstream) in implementing an agenda in the government, they could probably end up doing it with a frighteningly large base of support.

[Linnea]

That book scared me to death. It seemed so . . . plausible.

I read it in high school. It was part of our English reading.

Some parents raised a big stink in my town when a high school teacher assigned it. (It wasn't even required reading; it was one of a number of books you could choose from.) The official reason they were objecting was that it contained "an explicit sex scene involving a man and two women." Um, yes, but that scene was the exact opposite of erotic, IMHO.

[DistantStar]

Oddly, I found it totally implausible, and didn't like it at all. I've tried a couple of other things by Atwood and just don't like her stuff much. To each their own.

[Linnea]

I tend to like her earlier stuff better than her later, more science-fictiony stuff. The Handmaid's Tale is the only set-in-the-future book of hers that I like.

[xDreamerx]

Yes - this. There may not be that many hardcore fundie families, but the ranks of the fundie lites have been growing quickly. I read an article talking about how this is fed both by disaffected mainstreamers and by escaped fundies. A lot of those folks will side with the fundies on political issues at least to an extent. If the fundies are smart enough to move gradually(so as not to scare fundie lites and more moderate/traditional parts of the mainstream) in implementing an agenda in the government, they could probably end up doing it with a frighteningly large base of support.

Exactly, and they're very good at creating fake things that reflect their world view and mimic mainstream institutions. For example, The Creation "museum", "intelligent design", the centers that "research" creation science. I say "fake" because they're not institutions based on fact, evidence, or anything legitimate but merely their beliefs. Yet, they use the language and look of our culture trying to make themselves seem normal and legitimate. It helps to further mainstream them.

That book scared me to death. It seemed so . . . plausible.

Some parents raised a big stink in my town when a high school teacher assigned it. (It wasn't even required reading; it was one of a number of books you could choose from.) The official reason they were objecting was that it contained "an explicit sex scene involving a man and two women." Um, yes, but that scene was the exact opposite of erotic, IMHO.

Really? Wow. That's just so...I don't know, even though I know things like that happen, I'm a little surprised every time I hear about it. We didn't have any choice in what we read in high school. We were just given a syllabus and had to follow it, except for our Independent Study Unit which was like an individual term project where you had to write a paper and give a 20 min lecture. You got to choose your books for that, but even then there were some stipulations, but not in terms of content. It had to be a winner of certain awards.

[Deleted12]

The thing that freaks me out about the fundies is that their ideas have been injected into the mainstream of Christianity.

For example, if VF was only selling stuff to 100,000 families, I don't know that they could stay in business. I think somewhat mainstream Christians are buying their products, and that worries me.

[Soulhuntress]

The thing that freaks me out about the fundies is that their ideas have been injected into the mainstream of Christianity.

For example, if VF was only selling stuff to 100,000 families, I don't know that they could stay in business. I think somewhat mainstream Christians are buying their products, and that worries me.

A happy thought: Mainstream buyers may only see cute toys and don't necessarily look at who the company is.

[O Latin]

Oddly, I found it totally implausible, and didn't like it at all. I've tried a couple of other things by Atwood and just don't like her stuff much. To each their own.

I find most dystopian fiction to be implausible, and I hate that it's almost always interpreted as being a "warning" or a "prediction" of what could happen if things keep going the way they are. I don't know anyone who writes with that kind of an agenda, and to me most dystopian stuff seems to be more "what might happen if..." than "OMG, the world is actually going to turn out exactly like this if we don't do something!"

[Austin]

Of course it seems implausible. Artists and authors often use concepts that seem hypobolic or over-the-top in nature to make a point. It's fiction! :roll:

But if anyone doesn't believe that certain elements of the book could not come to pass in differing degrees in this country, then I say you're just not watching or listening enough.

Look at 1984 - dystopian fiction about a society ruled by an oligarchical dictatorship. Is it possible to argue that Orwell didn't have a point? Patriot Act, anyone. . . just for starters. . .

[Hane]

Of course it seems implausible. Artists and authors often use concepts that seem hypobolic or over-the-top in nature to make a point. It's fiction! :roll:

But if anyone doesn't believe that certain elements of the book could not come to pass in differing degrees in this country, then I say you're just not watching or listening enough.

Look at 1984 - dystopian fiction about a society ruled by an oligarchical dictatorship. Is it possible to argue that Orwell didn't have a point? Patriot Act, anyone. . . just for starters. . .

This. Utopia/dystopia has always been my very favorite literary theme. Well-written dystopian speculative fiction can take a bit of what's wrong with our real world and expand it into something that can scare the crap out of you because it does have a point. I first read 1984 as a twelve-year-old during the Cold War. Scared the crap out of me. I read it again as a seventeen-year-old during the "Summer of Love" year. Scared the crap out of me again--but for a different reason.

The Handmaid's Tale was the first dystopian novel to give me actual nightmares: the idea of being forbidden to read terrified me, so I immediately re-read the book in order to steel myself against the horror that's in it. One element of the novel shows that Atwood is indeed somewhat visionary: When it was written in 1985, people didn't use debit/credit cards for minor purchases like newspapers (as shown early on in the book), so invalidating a woman's "plastic" would be a huge blow against her autonomy.

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood extrapolate what could damn well happen should GMO-type biological engineering continue to get free rein and government and Big Business get even cozier than they are now.

Right now, I'm in the middle of Albert Brooks's seriocomic 2030, which, like Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, gives a glimpse of a worst-possible-outcome of the financial mess much of the western world is in now.

[leena_noor]

that book scared the shit out of me, and haunts me...daily. It really really freaked me out.

[deborahlynn1979]

hane, thank you so much for sharing your reading list. I'm adding these (well, apart from 1984, which I've already read) to my to-be-read queue. Have you read The Hunger Games trilogy yet? It's really, really great dystopian science fiction. If you have any more suggestions, please do send them my way.

Has anyone read Kindred by Octavia Butler? It has universally good reviews and I just bought it for my Kindle as it's on sale for less than five bucks.

[Hane]

hane, thank you so much for sharing your reading list. I'm adding these (well, apart from 1984, which I've already read) to my to-be-read queue. Have you read The Hunger Games trilogy yet? It's really, really great dystopian science fiction. If you have any more suggestions, please do send them my way.

Has anyone read Kindred by Octavia Butler? It has universally good reviews and I just bought it for my Kindle as it's on sale for less than five bucks.

Thanks for the reminder! The Hunger Games is on my must-read list. And I will go buy Kindred right away--I'm a major Octavia Butler fan.

[deborahlynn1979]

Thanks for the reminder! The Hunger Games is on my must-read list. And I will go buy Kindred right away--I'm a major Octavia Bulter fan.

Go ahead and block off about 8 hours or so for the first book. You will not be able to put it down. If you also have a Kindle, the first book is only $4.69!