Margaret Atwood is a fucking disappointment

submitted by FuriousPenguin from twitter.com

all 33 comments
sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun

[–]Lady_Montgomery 26 insightful - 1 fun26 insightful - 0 fun27 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Someone on spinster informed me that Atwood never really was a feminist to begin with and always refrained from being called one. Hand maids tale was mostly about the dangerous of religion. And not about the patriarchy at all, though those two seem to walk hand in hand imo

[–]FuriousPenguin[S] 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Damn. Sucks to hear the author that inspired my career is not a feminist. I'm feeling a bit lost and angry at the moment. How do you even deal with it when the people you admire fall!

[–]Lady_Montgomery 26 insightful - 1 fun26 insightful - 0 fun27 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

From spinster

I don't think Margaret Atwood was ever really a feminist. Yes, she wrote The Handmaid's Tale, but its more focused on the dangers of religious fascism than it is about women's rights. In her other books she writes about women, sometimes, but she doesn't purposely try to push, or even examine, any particularly feminist agendas. Some of her books - Oryx and Crake comes to mind - are actually pretty anti-women. And in interviews she's repeatedly resisted the label of "feminist," both for herself and for her books. She's also shown that she will not stand with women against men when it does not suit her personally to do so.

Point being, I'm not surprised she's taking this position. She's an academic and heavily involved with the Canadian woke-left. Of course she would support the party line. It would be nice if she showed a little critical thinking though

[–]FuriousPenguin[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I didn't finish reading Oryx. Honestly I got a little bored. Maybe it's because I first read her for my book club but she was discussed pretty much as a feminist there. Clearly I didn't watch enough of her interviews and focussed more on the books I enjoyed. I might need to see them with new eyes. I thought she was a feminist after finishing her Masterclass. She spoke about how she managed to get published for the first time and it just gave me feminist vibes. Suppose I read between the lines and found something that wasn't actually there.

[–]firebird 18 insightful - 2 fun18 insightful - 1 fun19 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't there a very easily refutable mistake in her tweet? I mean, how would biological sex ever translate into a bell curve? Even taking intersex people into consideration, the vast majority of people are very clearly identifiable as either male or female, which would result in the exact opposite of a bell curve. And even if you believe in gender, how would that fit on the bell curve? Most people are "cis", so that would be the middle part I guess, but what makes up the two parts on the sides?

[–][deleted] 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yep. Biological sex is straight-up dimorphic with a very small intersex population. Sexual attraction and gender expression could probably be mapped on bell curves by incidence. Maybe she's confusing the two, talking about seagulls? They can form same-sex pair bonds for nesting, but they're still male and female birds.

[–][deleted] 25 insightful - 2 fun25 insightful - 1 fun26 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

When people bring up intersex being .3% of the population as evidence of a sex spectrum, I like to mention we are a pentadactyl species - five fingers and five toes. We can also be born with fewer or more fingers or toes. More is called polydactyly and the rates for that are 1 in 500. (I can't find frequency numbers on fewer) Despite the rates being almost identical to intersex, literally no one is arguing we are a species with a spectrum of fingers and toes, because there is no political agenda aligned with our quantity of fingers. We can all understand we are still a pentadactyl species and there are disorders of development outliers.

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm loving that. 😄

[–]MezozoicGay 8 insightful - 4 fun8 insightful - 3 fun9 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

I watched Twitch recently. So I am sure one side is "trans-deer" or "trans-animals" and other side will be, eeeh, "trans-plants"? Because transgender people are still mostly identifying themselves as man or woman, which is in the middle.

[–]Spikygrasspod 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

The tails would be extreme glowering with explosions and deadly swordfights on stilts(!) on one side, and gentle cooing with smelling salts, glittery armadillo heels, and competetive inability to read maps(!) on the other!

Just kidding. Yes, people who say sex is a continuum tend to avoid saying exactly what kind of distribution there is because that would give up the game. Hint: it's not a bell curve.

[–]FuriousPenguin[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Everything is refutable but people refuse to believe any rebuttals or explanations. Of the ones "addressing" JKR's thread haven't actually addressed anything properly. It's like they think the loudest voice wins the argument.

[–]venecia 13 insightful - 1 fun13 insightful - 0 fun14 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Is there any way to tell anymore who actually believes this foolishness and who is just playing along to avoid being doxxed/death-threat'd/cancelled?

[–]FuriousPenguin[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I know a friend who plays along because she's scared she'll be friendless and alone in a new country. She's also hiding her right alignment so there's that. No way to guess unless you really know a person.

[–]SameOldBS 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The ones staying silent are the ones disagreeing, I think.

[–]cybitch 12 insightful - 2 fun12 insightful - 1 fun13 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, just think about all these XXXYYY chromosomed people who produce ovo-spermocells that are inbetween both types of gametes humans produce and make perfectly healthy babies with them. Oh wait, that doesn't happen. How anyone can call this science is beyond me. Wth kind of brainwashing are these people going through.

[–]Lilith_Fair 9 insightful - 2 fun9 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

She didn't disappoint me because I realized long ago, before Woke and Trans Craze, that her book was crap. So here's my story: I read The Handmaid's Tale back when I was in my twenties in the mid 90s. I was very much a self-proclaimed feminist back then, and I bought into all the fear mongering in that book. I thought the book was amazing. Fast forward to when I was in my early forties. I picked it up again and I couldn't even get past the first few chapters. Firstly, it was actually very badly written. Also, every character was one dimensional caricatures. Maybe it's because I also grew older and have seen the world more, her portrayal of the conservatives in North America completely lack nuances. Yes of course there are a lot of ways conservative politics and culture are bad for women. But hers was such a simplistic cardboard view the conservative right that even for me who lean liberal find it laughable. So as literature, it's just garbage. I also think she wrote this book as reflective of the evangelical climate of the 1990s, so the feel of the book was very dated to me when reading it many years later.

When the TV series came out, I couldn't even bother to watch it. I just couldn't stomach the fear mongering in the book itself.

There was one thing that bothered me throughout though, from when I first read it in my twenties and then later in my forties. There was a part where she had some Japanese women tourists visiting Gilead, and the Japanese women were all free and blissfully ignorant of the oppression of the white women in Gilead. That part is totally fucked up. Japan is a wonderful country, but as far as women's rights and equality go it is so far behind. For Atwood to portray Japanese women this way is just insulting to both Japanese women and North American women. It's completely blind to what life for Japanese women is like and the sexism they face, while idealizing a foreign culture in a way that is actually condescending, as some white liberals do. This part, really, was woke before Woke.

So yeah, I'm not disappointed. I hadn't bought into her bullshit for years.

[–]SashaLopez 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

So much THIS. I first read the book over a decade ago in my early twenties at the suggestion of some older feminist ladies I'd met online. I told them I thought it was dumb, unrealistic and hyperbolic. The massive shout-down I received turned me away from feminism for a good 5 years. They went on and on about how I was too young and naive to see the obvious genius of it and that I'd "see when you're older". Now that I'm older the only thing I see differently is their own biases; they were all White Liberal Boomer Feminists, mostly from Australia and western Europe, and upper middle class. They really didn't see how the portrayal in the book is not at all accurate to the actual religious right in America because they only saw America itself in caricatures and automatically assumed that as a young African-American, I couldn't possibly have anything of value to add to the discussion unless it was uncritical agreement with their opinions, not even when it was a critique of MY OWN country where I live and they only knew from long-distance media.

[–]Lilith_Fair 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

dumb, unrealistic and hyperbolic

OMG you described that book perfectly! Said it better than I did. You were way ahead of me too realizing in your early twenties this book was crap. Took me some years and maturity to see through all that BS. I'm sorry your views got dismissed that way. Things don't change. Now we're dismissed by the progressive Wokes, the same benevolent white upper middle class bunch here to tell us how to have correct think.

[–]writerlylesbian 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I feel the same. I didn't mind Handmaid's Tale when I first read it (I was 19), but I went on to discover way more feminist and/or lesbian sci fi and fantasy writers who tackled similar topics of dystopian futures etc. and did it better than Atwood did. Also, I could never stand the other books of Atwood's I read, they were so deeply boring full of dull characters I just couldn't care about.

Writers like Octavia Butler, Suzy McCee Chanas, Jane Yolen, Suzette Haden Elgin, Sally Miller Gearhart, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy to name just a few are all writers I would read for dystopian feminist sci fi before Atwood.

[–]lumiosestone 6 insightful - 4 fun6 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 4 fun -  (7 children)

At this point I’m wondering if The Handmaid’s Tale was actually ghostwritten by someone else.

[–]Spikygrasspod 22 insightful - 1 fun22 insightful - 0 fun23 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Nope. This is exactly the kind of female erasure people did with J K Rowling and GC feminists rightly called it out. Margaret Atwood wrote the Handmaid's Tale. Margaret Atwood posted a misleading article and tweeted something foolish and untrue.

[–]lumiosestone 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Sarcasm isn’t a thing that exists on this website, apparently.

[–]Spikygrasspod 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Oh sure, sometimes I overlook sarcasm. It's the internet, after all.

But whether or not you were sarcastic, this is exactly the kind of response JK Rowling got. TRAs know JK wrote her books. They were arguably all being sarcastic. It's still erasing female authorship. Either that's wrong or it's right. It's not right for you but wrong for TRAs.

[–]lumiosestone 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

No worries, I sometimes misinterpret the tone of comments, but I’ll make sure next time to note the snark and the end of a post.

And yeah, the way the TRAs are denying Rowling as the author of Harry Potter is downright despicable and disturbing. It’s another tactic to dismiss her achievements and it feeds into their denial of reality & their purity culture mentality, that an “awful” person couldn’t have created something beloved by many people.

[–]venecia 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You'll want to note sarcasm with ''/s'' at the end of a sentence you want read that way :)

[–]lumiosestone 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Gotcha, you’re right. Better to be safe than sorry when it comes to posting online.

[–]sallyseton 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Ironic you mention this because Atwood's poem "This is a Photograph of Me" is about the erasure of marginalized voices.

[–]PassionateIntensity 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yup. There's no way she's not smart enough to understand the issue. She's just a coward.

[–]AboveBatman 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Why?

[–]Camberian 13 insightful - 2 fun13 insightful - 1 fun14 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Because she excuses TRA speak with fake science.

[–]AboveBatman 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah I just saw her recent twitter activity. What a disgrace considering the content of Handmaid's tale.

[–]-thedarkhorse- 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I'm not entirely sure she is supporting the trans side. The article she posted is mostly waffle and it says 'In the cultural realm, this shift in perspective has already received a wide embrace' which suggests it's culture not reality. She has also invoked the legendary clownfish which usually means that person is in way over their head.

[–]wooger 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It’s a nothing article, with no scientific support for its assertions, and which jumps from one totally unscientific area to unrelated questionable science. I no longer have much respect for scientific American.

Anyone who mentions gender and science in the same sentence is basically taking the piss. And the concept clearly has no relevance in the animal kingdom.