DMBFFF
Literotica Guru
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- Sep 27, 2017
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(click pic for video)
9:35
The Handmaids Tale Plot Summary
7:22
The Handmaid’s Tale Summary
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/summary/
For the most part, I haven't read the book The Handmaid's Tale (or "A Handmaid's Tail" here): a few pages of the epilogue, years ago maybe, but that's pretty much it.
I saw the movie with Duvall, Richardson, and Dunaway (quite a roll-reversal from Network
for her).
I've yet to see the TV series as I regard the scenario to be so improbable as to be ridiculous and potentially boring (FWIW, I've yet to see Game of Thrones or most of the recent Star Trek movies as I'm kind of fed up with bad sci-fi in the latter case and lack of heroes in the former), but I saw a few scenes in YouTube.
I quickly checked the Wikipedia article a while ago.
Is it me, or is Wikipedia bad at describing stories?
From what I understand, in the story, the US becomes the "Republic of Gilead," which though isn’t a Christian theocracy, is something like it. There might have been conditions that left people infertile, save for a minority—I think a small minority—of women (and presumably some men). Those women are pressed into service as “handmaids” who bear children for rich couples in weird ritualized threesomes.
Gilead is a dictatorship and somewhat at war, albeit it mostly with the rest of the US. The book, like 1984, appears to have a happy ending, or happy-ending-of-sorts, though. The dictatorship is described in past tense in regular English (i.e. not something like Newspeak) by a professor describing things as a typical late 20th century/early 21st century professor would in a liberal university or something like it.
The book was written in the mid-1980s during the AIDS crises when some were going on about stuff—the end of the sexual revolution, God’s punishment against gays, later a conspiracy theory about an engineered virus to kill the marginalized.
Whatever.
Since Trump's been elected, the book has become popular again, the TV series, and there are protests including women in red.
To be fair to Margaret Atwood, I don't think she ever described it as prophecy, but said that her story borrowed things that have happened.
Fair enough.
So here are my questions about the book and story:
[size=+1]1. What caused this infertility?[/size]
and if it's not a plague, but the result of environmental degradation, wouldn't that affect animals? Wouldn't the trend to such degredation be reversed once it started to become manifest and/or technological fixes found?
[size=+1]2. Is the effect of infertility temporary or continuous?[/size]
If the former, will the infertile recover, or their children not get it? If so, would this undo at least some the basis for a Gilead? If permanent and continuous, is humanity doomed? Let’s say only 2% of women are fertile and they each have to produce as many as 30 babies per lifetime. That'd still be a population decline of (I think) over 70% per generation, or if people lived as long as 100, over 1.19% per annum.
[size=+1]3. Was anyone working on cures or even treatments in the story?[/size]
[size=+1]4. What is the nature of the infertility?[/size]
Bad eggs?
Why not implant fertilized donor eggs into otherwise healthy-but-sterile women?
Obstruction in the Fallopian tubes?
Similar treatment I guess.
Could hormonal therapy help?
[size=+1]5. Are these women that powerless?[/size]
Wow. What a bunch of wusses.
It's my understanding that as the Taliban never numbered over 100 000, and that the women of Afghanistan were likely over 10 million, the former were outnumbered by the latter +100:1; but the former could rule the latter as the latters' obedience training in the Muslim society started long before the former showed up.
But these are American women. Hear them roar. Not taking no guff from no male chauvinist pig. They who breathed the free air and won't give it up without a fight—perhaps destroy the new oppressors.
No?
Maybe that's Atwood's inadvertent message: you can push women around—even North American women.
[size=+1]6. Isn't America capitalist?[/size]
Doesn't big demand + small supply = big bucks?
What about explicit baby selling? It's already somewhat happening as women rent their wombs. Let's say a fertile woman charges $50 000 per live birth. She does that 20x and she’s a millionaire.
Too high? The fertile women are more plentiful than I'm thinking? Less of a basis for Gilead, I suppose.
If a fertile woman is not allowed free agency and to negotiate for a fair price, but is pressed into being a handmaid, who says she can't end it all? Abort the mission if you will. If a woman can commit suicide in prison, what makes those of Gilead think she can't even if chaperoned and sequestered?
Ask yourself; what is cheaper: keeping a fertile woman sequestered against her will, or paying her $50 000 for a baby for whom tests show you fathered?
Oh yeah, the movie. Wasn't Duvall’s character the infertile one? Why is he even bothering with this boring sex when he can fuck the "jezebels?"
Shooting blanks isn't going to replenish the population.
and why would he be permitted to continue to have sex with a handmaid if there are no children? Shouldn't he have to prove he's fertile if he wants a handmaid? Again, who wants this? It's another humiliation for the wife, even more for the handmaid who is being raped, and again, why fuck handmaids when he can fuck jezebels.
Must be particularly bad if the handmaids are biological determinists: giving birth to babies who fathers are rapists.
Oh, and are there no adoptions in Gilead?!?
Perhaps these women could have it good, even in Gilead.
Didn't Sarah kick Hagar (and Ishmael) out only after she had Isaac?
The handmaid could become even more a bitch queen than Hagar.
Maybe she'll get the wife to perform cunnilingus on her to enhance her chances of fertilization; and instead of the Old Testament reading, could they instead play some music? Secular music? Whatever the handmaid wants: after all, if she's happy, then likely her reproductive system is happy.
[size=+1]7. How Amer-centric is this story—maybe with references to Canada—maybe liberal Canada?[/size]
Ah, leftist Canadians—perhaps Atwood could be included in this: they complain about American ignorance of Canada yet most couldn't name, say, 10 states in Australia and Mexico.
Yeah, we Canadians are so liberal. This is why Stephen Harper was PM for about 10 years and a province with a third of Canadians recently elected a Trump-like Doug Ford. Canada: where paid surrogates are illegal, and if I understand correctly, freezing sperm is illegal in Sweden. Yeah, we sure would survive the infertility well.
Americans account for about 5% of the world's population but about a third of the world gross product. I wonder if this would lead to millions of fertile women from developing countries coming to America for a life of relative-at-least luxury—if yet somewhat hobbled by near continuous pregnancy.
Conversely if America treats its fertile women oppressively and terribly, wouldn't they emigrate to other countries? Europe, China, India, Canada, Australia, maybe a petro-state in Arabia? But wouldn't they have to wear a abayas, chadors, niqabs, or hijabs? No worse than the red-habit-like garments.
Back in ye olden days, women in harems, even attractive slave women, were reputedly kept slightly fat and well-cared for.
Speaking of others, how many black ladies were/are in the movie and shows? Any Latinas?
Those rich Gilead men might have to hire some translators.
I can see it now, the white de jure wife serving the black handmaid—maybe braid her hair or do her nails with loud rap music in the background.
[size=+1]8. and why were the infertile women forbidden to work again?[/size]
To stay home, raise babies, and …,? But aren't they infertile? Or maybe its to discourage such potentially freer women from seemingly having it better than the fertile?
Wouldn't mass firings of women wreck the economy? Aren't there millions of working women—i.e. outside the home—in Iran and Saudi Arabia?
Who's going to do the scut work?
All-male nurses, receptionists and secretaries, food handlers, cashiers, servers, office cleaners, flight attendants, fruit and vegetable pickers, retailers, elementary school teachers, tour guides: no women, just men.
No more female doctors, dentists, and other experts?
Back when Margaret Atwood’s mother and grandmother were young, a lot of that unpaid domestic labour contributed greatly to the economy. Now we have washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, cars, and microwaves: and even 100 years ago, probably a fair number of women worked out of home—and particularly during wartime.
Imagine an America/Gilead with 10s of millions—perhaps over 100 millions—of laid-off, now poor (or poorer), frustrated women, and perhaps +1% who’d rather die than continue to live under their new shitty existence.
Any transmen? Ever see the movie Yentl?
What could, say, +50 million American women, with +50 billion person-hours a year of thinking, planning, and attempting, do to wreck the Republic of Gilead?
I can imagine it now: millions—tens of millions—of infertile American women, joining some of their fertile sisters, fleeing into Canada and Mexico to go to countries where things might be better. They might be infertile, but many are skilled, even talented, speak English, and likely many are attractive.
[size=+1]9. enforced illiteracy of women?!? Yeah, that's going to happen and it will be great for the economy![/size]
This is not like African slaves: most who were probably already illiterate (as well as perhaps a lot of whites). Suppression of their reading and writing is easier when they can't read or write to begin with. People won't just forget to read and write; and even before 1860, how many 1000s of blacks could read?
Pictures? kinda like pictographs?
[size=+1]10. Security issues.[/size]
Want to hurt Gilead? Kill all handmaids. Kill any woman covered in red. Truck bomb any handmaid center. (Maybe give the suicidal ones black pills.)
(Kinda like one of my first thread when I first joined Literotica: It's the 1850s and you're witnessing a massive slave auction.)
[size=+1]11. Now how does this happen in the US again? These "Sons of Jacob" kill the US President and Congresspeople and nearly everybody just falls in line?[/size]
It sounds even less probable than Amerika (wp), which at least had outside influences. Gilead is even worse than Iran, where at least women are allowed to read, go to university, drive cars, Jews are not forced to convert, and Christians can drink sacramental wine. I doubt Islamic State at its greatest extent had 5% the territory the US has.
(source)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092316/mediaindex
This came out a few years after Handmaid's Tale.
Amerika - Trailer (TV Mini Series, 1987)
1:59
[size=+1]12. Lastly, how much of the US does Gilead occupy? How strong is the occupation? Is it continuous war? If so, Gilead will need women in the factories making munitions and other goods.[/size]
(click pic for video)
6:41
I'd bring up the issue of xeno-whatever implants and artificial wombs, but such might not be as speculative as Atwood's story.
Everything Wrong With The Handmaid's Tale "Offred"
6:42
White feminism and The Handmaid's Tale Season 2
22:57
(FWIW, I found it worth the time.)yen
9:35
The Handmaids Tale Plot Summary
7:22
The Handmaid’s Tale Summary
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/handmaid/summary/
For the most part, I haven't read the book The Handmaid's Tale (or "A Handmaid's Tail" here): a few pages of the epilogue, years ago maybe, but that's pretty much it.
I saw the movie with Duvall, Richardson, and Dunaway (quite a roll-reversal from Network
for her).I've yet to see the TV series as I regard the scenario to be so improbable as to be ridiculous and potentially boring (FWIW, I've yet to see Game of Thrones or most of the recent Star Trek movies as I'm kind of fed up with bad sci-fi in the latter case and lack of heroes in the former), but I saw a few scenes in YouTube.
I quickly checked the Wikipedia article a while ago.
Is it me, or is Wikipedia bad at describing stories?
From what I understand, in the story, the US becomes the "Republic of Gilead," which though isn’t a Christian theocracy, is something like it. There might have been conditions that left people infertile, save for a minority—I think a small minority—of women (and presumably some men). Those women are pressed into service as “handmaids” who bear children for rich couples in weird ritualized threesomes.
Gilead is a dictatorship and somewhat at war, albeit it mostly with the rest of the US. The book, like 1984, appears to have a happy ending, or happy-ending-of-sorts, though. The dictatorship is described in past tense in regular English (i.e. not something like Newspeak) by a professor describing things as a typical late 20th century/early 21st century professor would in a liberal university or something like it.
The book was written in the mid-1980s during the AIDS crises when some were going on about stuff—the end of the sexual revolution, God’s punishment against gays, later a conspiracy theory about an engineered virus to kill the marginalized.
Whatever.
Since Trump's been elected, the book has become popular again, the TV series, and there are protests including women in red.
To be fair to Margaret Atwood, I don't think she ever described it as prophecy, but said that her story borrowed things that have happened.
Fair enough.
So here are my questions about the book and story:
[size=+1]1. What caused this infertility?[/size]
and if it's not a plague, but the result of environmental degradation, wouldn't that affect animals? Wouldn't the trend to such degredation be reversed once it started to become manifest and/or technological fixes found?
[size=+1]2. Is the effect of infertility temporary or continuous?[/size]
If the former, will the infertile recover, or their children not get it? If so, would this undo at least some the basis for a Gilead? If permanent and continuous, is humanity doomed? Let’s say only 2% of women are fertile and they each have to produce as many as 30 babies per lifetime. That'd still be a population decline of (I think) over 70% per generation, or if people lived as long as 100, over 1.19% per annum.
[size=+1]3. Was anyone working on cures or even treatments in the story?[/size]
[size=+1]4. What is the nature of the infertility?[/size]
Bad eggs?
Why not implant fertilized donor eggs into otherwise healthy-but-sterile women?
Obstruction in the Fallopian tubes?
Similar treatment I guess.
Could hormonal therapy help?
[size=+1]5. Are these women that powerless?[/size]
Wow. What a bunch of wusses.
It's my understanding that as the Taliban never numbered over 100 000, and that the women of Afghanistan were likely over 10 million, the former were outnumbered by the latter +100:1; but the former could rule the latter as the latters' obedience training in the Muslim society started long before the former showed up.
But these are American women. Hear them roar. Not taking no guff from no male chauvinist pig. They who breathed the free air and won't give it up without a fight—perhaps destroy the new oppressors.
No?
Maybe that's Atwood's inadvertent message: you can push women around—even North American women.
[size=+1]6. Isn't America capitalist?[/size]
Doesn't big demand + small supply = big bucks?
What about explicit baby selling? It's already somewhat happening as women rent their wombs. Let's say a fertile woman charges $50 000 per live birth. She does that 20x and she’s a millionaire.
Too high? The fertile women are more plentiful than I'm thinking? Less of a basis for Gilead, I suppose.
If a fertile woman is not allowed free agency and to negotiate for a fair price, but is pressed into being a handmaid, who says she can't end it all? Abort the mission if you will. If a woman can commit suicide in prison, what makes those of Gilead think she can't even if chaperoned and sequestered?
Ask yourself; what is cheaper: keeping a fertile woman sequestered against her will, or paying her $50 000 for a baby for whom tests show you fathered?
Oh yeah, the movie. Wasn't Duvall’s character the infertile one? Why is he even bothering with this boring sex when he can fuck the "jezebels?"
Shooting blanks isn't going to replenish the population.
and why would he be permitted to continue to have sex with a handmaid if there are no children? Shouldn't he have to prove he's fertile if he wants a handmaid? Again, who wants this? It's another humiliation for the wife, even more for the handmaid who is being raped, and again, why fuck handmaids when he can fuck jezebels.
Must be particularly bad if the handmaids are biological determinists: giving birth to babies who fathers are rapists.
Oh, and are there no adoptions in Gilead?!?
Perhaps these women could have it good, even in Gilead.
Didn't Sarah kick Hagar (and Ishmael) out only after she had Isaac?
The handmaid could become even more a bitch queen than Hagar.
Maybe she'll get the wife to perform cunnilingus on her to enhance her chances of fertilization; and instead of the Old Testament reading, could they instead play some music? Secular music? Whatever the handmaid wants: after all, if she's happy, then likely her reproductive system is happy.
[size=+1]7. How Amer-centric is this story—maybe with references to Canada—maybe liberal Canada?[/size]
Ah, leftist Canadians—perhaps Atwood could be included in this: they complain about American ignorance of Canada yet most couldn't name, say, 10 states in Australia and Mexico.
Yeah, we Canadians are so liberal. This is why Stephen Harper was PM for about 10 years and a province with a third of Canadians recently elected a Trump-like Doug Ford. Canada: where paid surrogates are illegal, and if I understand correctly, freezing sperm is illegal in Sweden. Yeah, we sure would survive the infertility well.
Americans account for about 5% of the world's population but about a third of the world gross product. I wonder if this would lead to millions of fertile women from developing countries coming to America for a life of relative-at-least luxury—if yet somewhat hobbled by near continuous pregnancy.
Conversely if America treats its fertile women oppressively and terribly, wouldn't they emigrate to other countries? Europe, China, India, Canada, Australia, maybe a petro-state in Arabia? But wouldn't they have to wear a abayas, chadors, niqabs, or hijabs? No worse than the red-habit-like garments.
Back in ye olden days, women in harems, even attractive slave women, were reputedly kept slightly fat and well-cared for.
Speaking of others, how many black ladies were/are in the movie and shows? Any Latinas?
Those rich Gilead men might have to hire some translators.
I can see it now, the white de jure wife serving the black handmaid—maybe braid her hair or do her nails with loud rap music in the background.
[size=+1]8. and why were the infertile women forbidden to work again?[/size]
To stay home, raise babies, and …,? But aren't they infertile? Or maybe its to discourage such potentially freer women from seemingly having it better than the fertile?
Wouldn't mass firings of women wreck the economy? Aren't there millions of working women—i.e. outside the home—in Iran and Saudi Arabia?
Who's going to do the scut work?
All-male nurses, receptionists and secretaries, food handlers, cashiers, servers, office cleaners, flight attendants, fruit and vegetable pickers, retailers, elementary school teachers, tour guides: no women, just men.
No more female doctors, dentists, and other experts?
Back when Margaret Atwood’s mother and grandmother were young, a lot of that unpaid domestic labour contributed greatly to the economy. Now we have washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, cars, and microwaves: and even 100 years ago, probably a fair number of women worked out of home—and particularly during wartime.
Imagine an America/Gilead with 10s of millions—perhaps over 100 millions—of laid-off, now poor (or poorer), frustrated women, and perhaps +1% who’d rather die than continue to live under their new shitty existence.
Any transmen? Ever see the movie Yentl?
What could, say, +50 million American women, with +50 billion person-hours a year of thinking, planning, and attempting, do to wreck the Republic of Gilead?
I can imagine it now: millions—tens of millions—of infertile American women, joining some of their fertile sisters, fleeing into Canada and Mexico to go to countries where things might be better. They might be infertile, but many are skilled, even talented, speak English, and likely many are attractive.
[size=+1]9. enforced illiteracy of women?!? Yeah, that's going to happen and it will be great for the economy![/size]
This is not like African slaves: most who were probably already illiterate (as well as perhaps a lot of whites). Suppression of their reading and writing is easier when they can't read or write to begin with. People won't just forget to read and write; and even before 1860, how many 1000s of blacks could read?
Pictures? kinda like pictographs?
[size=+1]10. Security issues.[/size]
Want to hurt Gilead? Kill all handmaids. Kill any woman covered in red. Truck bomb any handmaid center. (Maybe give the suicidal ones black pills.)
(Kinda like one of my first thread when I first joined Literotica: It's the 1850s and you're witnessing a massive slave auction.)
[size=+1]11. Now how does this happen in the US again? These "Sons of Jacob" kill the US President and Congresspeople and nearly everybody just falls in line?[/size]
It sounds even less probable than Amerika (wp), which at least had outside influences. Gilead is even worse than Iran, where at least women are allowed to read, go to university, drive cars, Jews are not forced to convert, and Christians can drink sacramental wine. I doubt Islamic State at its greatest extent had 5% the territory the US has.
(source)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092316/mediaindex
This came out a few years after Handmaid's Tale.
Amerika - Trailer (TV Mini Series, 1987)
1:59
[size=+1]12. Lastly, how much of the US does Gilead occupy? How strong is the occupation? Is it continuous war? If so, Gilead will need women in the factories making munitions and other goods.[/size]
(click pic for video)
6:41
I'd bring up the issue of xeno-whatever implants and artificial wombs, but such might not be as speculative as Atwood's story.
Everything Wrong With The Handmaid's Tale "Offred"
6:42
White feminism and The Handmaid's Tale Season 2
22:57
(FWIW, I found it worth the time.)yen
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10220835/809754970.jpg.jpg)
