Margaret Atwood is a Canadian feminist author best known for The Handmaid's Tale. It's a book that pretty directly translates the Islamic Revolution in Iran to America (which had occurred not that many years earlier.) Had Atwood done that literally, her book would have been burned and she would have been fatwa'ed. Instead The Handmaid's Tale imagines a "Christian" takeover of America accompanied by the repression of women. That's what made it popular with the left.
Recently, Hulu, a failing service trying to compete with Netflix and Amazon, went full #resistance by ordering A Handmaid's Tale series. Warren Littlefield, the guy you might vaguely remember from Seinfeld, boasts that the mediocre show, which won awards because of its politics is, the #resistance. Lefty activists, when they aren't wearing pink hats, dress up in pseudo-medieval garb to protest Trump because, apparently, Trump is the embodiment of a Christian theocracy. The show feeds lefty paranoia of a right-wing takeover. Meanwhile the left actually is taking over and repressing everyone.
Even the author of the Handmaid's Tale.
Margaret Atwood became embroiled in defending a professor who was accused of sexual misconduct, then put through the usual kangaroo court system in which you're guilty until proven innocent. And innocence is not an option. Now she has a Globe and Mail piece up defending herself against attacks from feminists.
Any feminist heroine who lives long enough... will become the villain.
"Am I a bad feminist?" she asks.
The answer is clearly, yes. Good feminists jump to conclusions and view all men as the enemy. Atwood instead produces a well reasoned historical overview of witch hunts.
My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They're not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn't need a legal system.
Clearly Atwood doesn't understand intersectionality, punching up or that oppressed people can never misbehave relative to their oppressors, only to those they in turn oppress. Women can do no wrong vis a vis men, unless the men are gay or Muslim. Likewise white women can do no right vis a vis non-white men, and non-white men can do no right vis a vis an even more oppressed minority.
This is Identity Politics 101, but Atwood insists on being rational and liberal in the face of an irrational and illiberal left.
Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we're back to the 19th century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.
And so we're back in Handmaid's Tale territory. Except the feminists are the ones arguing that women are helpless children. Just like all minorities.
Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such rights.
And? The 'surely, not' is so touchingly naive.
This structure – guilty because accused – has applied in many more episodes in human history than Salem. It tends to kick in during the "Terror and Virtue" phase of revolutions – something has gone wrong, and there must be a purge, as in the French Revolution, Stalin's purges in the USSR, the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina and the early days of the Iranian Revolution...
As for vigilante justice – condemnation without a trial – it begins as a response to a lack of justice – either the system is corrupt, as in prerevolutionary France, or there isn't one, as in the Wild West – so people take things into their own hands. But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained. The Cosa Nostra, for instance, began as a resistance to political tyranny...
The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.
If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers?...
We're seeing the answer already. Online lynch mobs, organized by lefty activists, the same ones that Atwood is fighting, and the media.
Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.
That last sentence alone is worth the price of admission. It's why the left inevitably creates nightmarish totalitarian systems. It's trying to do the impossible. Eliminate the ambiguity of human nature. And enthrone its ideology of the New Man (or Womyn).