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Thursday
I’m wondering, in thinking about my forthcoming book Better Living through Literature (release date August 22), whether I should have spent more time talking about Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. This classic work of dystopian or speculative fiction (Atwood prefers the latter description) is increasingly proving its worth at clarifying the misogyny that is at work in certain parts of our culture.
Trump choosing J.D. Vance to be his running mate makes the novel even more timely given that Vance, amazingly, is even worse than Trump when it comes to women. Or at least, policies concerning women. (Trump has him beat in the rape department.) Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg describes Vance as coming out of “the pro-Putin, pro-oligarch, Handmaid’s Tale wing of the GOP,” while Trump niece Mary Trump noted that “American women will know misery if by some great tragedy Donald and Vance get into the White House because those two will make The Handmaid’s Tale our reality.”
Among the extremist positions Vance has taken concerning women are the following:
–that women should remain in abusive marriages:
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”
–that there should be an end to no-fault divorce on the grounds that it “undermines family stability”;
–that there should be no abortion exceptions for rape or incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right”:
“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient” (my italics).
–that the police should have access to the records of women who cross state lines to have abortions:
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Donald Trump’s pick for vice presidential nominee, pressured federal regulators last June to kill a privacy rule that prevents police from accessing the medical records of people seeking reproductive services, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. The rule was designed to prevent state and local police in anti-abortion states from using private records to hunt down and prosecute people who cross state lines in search of abortion services.
–that there shouldn’t be a federal right to accessing contraception or in vitro fertilization (he, along with most Republican members of Congress, voted against Democratic attempts to protect these rights);
–that women shouldn’t choose career over motherhood:
“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”
–that women are effectively running and ruining the country. Vance describes these women as
a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. and its just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?
—-that there should be some sort of national abortion ban:
I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions. But I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”
It’s clear why he would want such a “minimum national standard” given that he sees “something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children.”
As Jessica Valenti, who runs the blog Abortion, Every Day has put it,
Vance’s anti-abortion beliefs are driven by a broader desire for traditional gender norms and a world where women didn’t have choices about anything, not just their bodies. Like so many men obsessed with the “trad” movement, however, Vance shrouds his old-school misogyny as concern for women’s happiness.
So could Trump and Vance impose such a country on us? In Atwood’s novel, Gilead comes to power in part because of complacency, with people figuring that their own lives will not be impacted. While the narrator notes that, in the days before the fundamentalist takeover, there were some reports of atrocities by Christian terrorists—just as we have seen multiple mass shootings by rightwing gunmen—the women in Atwood’s novel shrug them off as involving “other women”:
But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual…We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
There’s a reason why conservative school boards throughout the country are banning Handmaid’s Tale. And why it’s important to get the novel into as many hands as possible. And to vote blue.
