The "feminists should be nice to men" trope is back. So is "The Handmaid's Tale"

[niyad]

The "feminists should be nice to men" trope is back. So is "The Handmaid's Tale"


Creeping back into commentary is the notion that male power will be kinder to women if they flatter it. If history can’t demolish this notion, maybe fiction can

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted into a television series. The novel describes an America where a fundamentalist Christian coup swiftly installs a government that excludes all women from civil life. Gender roles become a matter policed by law enforcement. Some women are merely confined to the home, others are forced into slavery. If you’ve seen the photos of the exclusively male crowd in Donald Trump’s Oval Office signing anti-abortion legislation, the adaptation perhaps seems timely. Atwood herself has suggested as much in the New York Times. Her premise writing it in 1985 was to posit the logical conclusion of the anti-feminist agenda she witnessed stirring in the west. Three decades and the internet later, the social undercurrents she explored have lost their subtlety. They are now the explicit character of the White House, in the mass media and everywhere online.


I have written – again and again – of the novel’s iconic character, Serena Joy. She’s an anti-feminist activist before the coup and the victory of her own mission results in her subsequent disempowerment, confinement and misery. In a world where white women voters assisted the delivery of American government to the pussy-grabbing Donald Trump, I am clearly one of many for whom the ghost of Serena Joy haunts political conversations about women and power, and not just because of Kellyanne Conway or the en-towered Melania Trump. I see Serena lurking around the repeated, sly advice to women that there is greater value in sidling up to male power than there is in sisterhood and autonomy.


One would think the evidence would have banished this notion to fiction even if we can’t scrub it from history. Real-life politics is stark while novels meander; sidling up to male power may deliver a handful of female MPs into the Liberal/National party caucus, but Labor women are more numerous – and more powerful – due to a quota system that feminists collectively strategised, fought for and won. But feminists are instructed to ignore the means of our own achievements, and instead believe that male power will be more kind and generous to women if they just flatter it, or pretend there’s a status quo in which patriarchy doesn’t exist.

. . . . .

It’s not a position confined to one side of the ideological scale. “Men granted women the right to vote,” feminists were reminded this week in a local progressive journal, the writer’s article attempting persuasion with some “you catch more flies with honey” nonsense to replace the historical reality of suffragette bombings, occupations, mass demonstration, suicide martyrdom and strikes. Thank God for Sally McManus making the simple point in her National Press Club speech on Wednesday: “vested interests do not give up their power without a fight.” No, they don’t. Let’s return to the United States, and consider how well it’s working out for those women who voted Donald Trump into office against the “nasty woman” who opposed him. Let’s look closely at the photos entirely of men attempting to “grant” restrictions or denial of “basic reproductive health care such as pregnancy, maternity and newborn care” and “screening for diseases including breast and cervical cancer”.

. . . .




Without sisters, love, you’re not “doing it for yourself” – you’re doing what the boys’ club decides.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/31/the-feminists-should-be-nice-to-men-trope-is-back-so-is-the-handmaids-tale