Mario the lone bookwolf's Reviews > The Handmaid’s Tale

That´s just a fictional novel if one lives in one of the privileged, rich countries. In many areas of the world, these are, a little better or worse, still the real living conditions for many women.

Flexing social sci fi muscles like no man could, at least until now.
It´s a milestone of both feministic and Sci-Fi writing, a social Sci-Fi masterpiece that goes deep under the skin and lets the reader alone after finishing the book, reflecting on society and how often circumstances like that have been and still are a reality, although most people prefer to suppress those thinkings because of the implications. And if it´s not because of the inner discomfort, there are social conventions, small talk rules, and political correctness that prohibit talking about things like female genital mutilation, killing baby girls or letting them die, and all other manifestations of patriarchy and misogyny camouflaged as ideology and faith. In civilized societies, all of these are serious crimes with felons ending in supermax prisons or institutions for the criminally insane, sadly not always forever.

Could escalate backlashing backward too
What can go unnoticed are the different increments and degrees of severity behind the fiction. That can be just a little bit of discrimination and sexism, "funny" jokes, to restrictions regarding education, sexual freedom, and contraception( especially the US is amazingly degenerating towards conservative bible belt faith fueled disenfranchisement of women )until finally, again, reaching the ideal, real stone age image of women. With polygamy and harems, no rights, infanticide, etc. Luckily still just an exaggeration, but each step backward on the sociocultural evolutionary ladder has the potential to cause chain reactions, especially if a black swan event like a global catastrophe, war, or economic meltdown lets society fall into pieces.

Divide and rule
An already fragile, cracked, and deliberately weakened foundation of emancipation, equality, and human rights, as in many US and European states thanks to crazy neoliberal Friedman fewer dreams becoming cyberpunk realities, would make it much easier to enslave females again. The poverty, suffering, and stultification generated by lacking distributional justice breed the population susceptible to demagogues and extremists making it possible.

Big history reading at schools
Once again a novel that should be reflected and discussed in schools, because many other topics, as mentioned before, could be included too. Probably in combination with Big History, to do critical analyses of the way history shaped and shapes the conditions we live in. The impact of media and trends on girls and young women, the still-unsolved problem of how to deal with domestic and sexual violence, the gender gap, the income gap, etc.

Luck and coincidence of where one is born as what
Probably one should start asking how it could come so far that little girls grow into young women who are rightless slaves in one area of the world, and conditioned to be mindless, superficial dressing dolls without any real chance against sexual harassment and less payment in so-called high developed countries, while the state is caring more about the right, political correct phrasing of male and female job descriptions and female quotas, instead of digging deeper to the ground of the problem that consists of patriarchic power structures with integrated misogyny. Just whitewashed and hidden to be in better line with corporate responsibility.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this, yuck, ugh, boo, completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_His...