#like i understand that religious horror can still be pro-religion but where do you see catholicism being presented as a truly good thing her

[physicstaff]

please tell me i'm not the only one who does not interpret valle verde's messaging as pro-religion. please.

[plunder-heaven-and-devour-god]

im gonna go full english lit under the cut

I saw measure for measure??? with my local Shakespeare in the Park about  month and a half ago and im mcfucking obsessed with it. So much so that ive tried to find every clip of every film, every show, rehearsal, production, that i can to compare how scenes played out. I even listened to a harvard lecture about it, i’m that far gone. I BOUGHT. A SHIRT. I bought the book with additional notes and discussions because this play is fascinating.

WHY AM I OBSESSED?!

All readings through different lenses are there in full force, fully supported, living side beside with one another. And professors, actors, directors, scholars etc, all seem to congregate on the fact that not one reading is more valid than the other. Theyre so well balanced without ever really given moral answers but merely presented, almost like the Jacobean meaning of the “glass” both a mirror to predict the future and reflect on oneself. And in a post elizabethan age where puritans were outlawing plays and putting stricter holds on licentiousess this play is so close to upsetting the dominant religious force.

And the READINGS! ARE ALL! SO GOOD! There is historicist reading (king James I), Folkloric, Religious, SadoMasochist, Psychosexual, Moral, Feminist, and Capitalistic readings. THEY ALL EXIST SIDE BY SIDE.

And the staging of the play determines how many of these a production can pull together. I think that is why I wanted to see as many scenes are possible. 

I think just the way Angelo and Isabella are played will determine which main reading the play tackles. 

I’ve seen some versions of the interview scenes that are truly horrific acts of sexual violence that made me watch between my fingers. In this the feminist reading can come into full force, the full underline of Angelo as a sexual predator is made prevalent. And the line “and with an outstretched throat i will tell the world what man thou art, Angelo” being present that strong feminist reading IS ALWAYS THERE. (DID I MENTION I LOVE ISABELLA FLAWS AND ALL). The idea that Isabellas voice is the most crucial device in the play is FLOORING.  

The Duke being a nearly godly figure who knows all and manipulates all, Angelo as his emissary becomes like an angel in the process of self corruption, from the inhumane ice he is so dubbed to warmed by the sins he so condemns. And Isabella defending the thing she so hates because it is her brother who commits the sin is the defense of someone who does not truly believe her brother is just. Mercy as justice. To wield power and to use it for mercy is so profound, and she is the only one who carries her ethos through like this to the end ofthe play. I’m not a theologist but so far this is the reading of theologists into the matter.

The version I saw in person he practically throws himself at her feet and it becomes an interplay of the psychosexual and moral. His knees buckle under her touch, it becomes the interaction of repressed sexuality channeled into both law and religion. In the Stratford production Isabella wipes her brow with water out of disgust or heat, no one is sure. it’s left ambivalent. In the one I saw Angelo was made almost comedic and sympathetic, which made ISabellas mercy still feel like an axe coming down upon his head. 

And then characters like Barnadine just using comedy, the genre of the gods as the greeks called it, to dimish law, to put it to shame. To put the godly/playwright Duke in his place.

The folkloric bed switch (which is folklore yes but Im not totally comfortable calling it consensual even tho Angelo is a sexual predator you can bring modern sensibilities to the reading), is indicative of oral traditions that predate shakespeare. The idea that every character must do in this play the thing they most loathe to do.

Claudio fears death so he must die, Isabella must have sex to save a life when she has sworn herself to chastity. Then they both sort of hurt each other, Claudio by asking her to yield herself up to this non consensual sexual coercion of upmost grossness, and isabella by telling him to be happy he will die because there is nothing so painful as being alive (ISABELLA HES AN EXPECTING FATHER). He asks her to do the thing she loathes most in a fit of desperation because the man who loves life must die. And Isabella the woman who “would wear these keen whips as rubies” would have have done anything but sex, tells her brother that living isnt worth it. ITS INTENSE. LIKE WOW.

It’s absolutely no surprise that Isabella and Angelo are my favourite characters in the play. This awful sexual coercion (the degree of violence is dependant on staging which is like holy shit WTF), lives side by side with the fact that they are the two only people whose language, diction, beats, and intelligence matches each other. They both have the same fervor for their moral divisions and hierarchies. The idea of strict testing of morals and faith is in the text. Isabella wishes for harsher, more challenging, and harrowing tests of faith. You can argue as to why, I personally think its for the strengthening of faith and connection to the divine. Meanwhile Angelo is the one setting restrictions for hundreds of thousands of vienna, setting those on other people to strengthen the connection to a higher moral fibre, and I think in some respects faith as well but thats my interpretation. 

Where others live their vices without restrictions, these two set limits for either themselves and/or others to be something more. They are in the way that motif of the “glass” The mirror. In that sense they reflect each other, but they also become each others foil. Which is why I do think a case can be made for the parallels with the psycho sexual and the SadoMasochist readings. Restraints for rewards, the repression on both their parts is there.

I’m not saying that negates the strong feminist reading or in anyway shape or form validates the absolute horror of the coerced sex/rape. I just say that they exist side by side with each other. They are equals in text/language/fervour AND YET they are not because he holds every power over her and her brother. He wants to restrict others where he cannot restrict himself, and Isabella restricts herself in part because she lives in a Vienna full of vice. She has a control over her own self that he proves not to have. And HE has a control over the world of the play that she cant. 

AND YET. SHE IS MARRIED TO THE DUKE. SHE MARRIES INTO PROMINENCE. I don’t love the idea that she does not become a nun, her original want, and is instead coopted by the shitty duke (i am not pro duke sorry). The only upside at the end of the play is that Isabella can, in some measure, have political sway over the masses. Meanwhile Angelos fall and forgiveness put him into a marriage where his vice of coercive sex becomes consummation of a sleeping marriage. IT FEELS LIKE they sort of mirror each other the whole way through the play. ITS WEIRD BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH SEXUAL AND POLITICAL INEQUALITY TO THEM. ITs a play full of contradictions which I LOVE BECAUSE IT IS NOT SIMPLE NOT BECAUSE IT IS RIGHT. I do think there is a case to be made that Isabella unwillingly comes face to face with sexuality, his and hers, and its not on terms she wants, but it happens. And you see her struggling to maintain the authority over her own autonomy. But then she has to contemplate sex for herself, “to give up her boy into saucy sweetness, licentiousness, the filthy vices”. What does ISabella do when she comes face to face with her own sexual needs, whatever she may be? We have productions in the Stratford archives from 50 years ago that make an ambiguous case that the meeting of morality and sex might actually do something for her? I DON’T KNOW. The readings keep coming. There is a possiblity for a strong Ace reading for her which no one really touches on. 

ON A LIGHTER NOTE

This play has my favourite sexual innuendo. When theyre like “WHAT DID CLAUDIO DO?”

“Her?”

“no! What did he do to get taken away by the provost”

“HIS GIRLFRIEND.” 

(god and isnt it nuts that the first man on the scaffold for unlawful fornication IS IN A CONSENSUAL LOVING RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND, A BOND AND CRIME THAT THE LAW (ANGELO) HAVE DEEMED IMMORAL. YET THE LAW (ANGELO) WOULD HAVE IT PARDONNED BY A NON CONSENSUAL SEX FOR EXECUTION PARDON. THE MASK OF MORALITY OF ANGELO. JFC HES SO FUCKED, like hes AWFUL, because he ends up sending claudio to death after he thinks hes had sex with isabella. LIKE WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT ND YET STILL WEARS THE LAW AS HIS MASK AFTER THE ANGEL HAS FALLEN. ITS COMPLEX AND I LOVE IT)

God and just…the sex jokes, the black comedy of barnadine right next to the high shooting morals of angelo, isabella, and mariana (another complex af character. The 1976 version certainly makes a psychosexual explanation out of that, which im not sure i enjoy. Again the psychosexual has its limits in a play about sexual coercion and rape)

AND THE FACT THAT MERCY IS WHAT SETS YOU FREE, LIKE PROSPERO FORGIVING HIS ENEMIES, ISABELLA FORGIVING ANGELO IS A HERCULEAN FEAT, IT FEELS CLOSE TO GODLINESS IDK MAN. AND I UNDERSTAND WHY SHE TELLS HER BROTHER NO I WONT SLEEP WITH HIM FOR YOUR LIFE BECAUSE ITS RAPE, BUT THEN IS LIKE BE GLAD BEING ALIVE IS SHITTY ANYWAYS. Im like? ISABELLA? WHAT?! ISabella does not know about herself that she can be desired because GOD DOES IT TAKE HER A WHILE TO UNDERSTAND ANGELOS MEANING, and yet shes got such a force for words. I find it hard to think being married to the duke that she wont have some power. 

And the exchange of Angelo and Isabella in the second interview.

-His moral stance on unlawful fornication starts with abortive language, the harsh restrictions but DEVOLVES INTO THE SEXUAL WITH THE INTELLECTUAL DICTION, It becomes a mirror of himself until he is explicit of what he wants from her. (OH GOD TRULY HE GIVES ME NAUSEOUS AND YET THE ONE IN THE PLAY I SAW HE WAS ENTHRALLING I HATE THE RANGE OF THINGS ANGELO CAN MAKE ME FEEL). His mask of morality is slowly removed

-ISABELLA must argue on behalf of her brother, believing in restrictions of the kid angelo speaks of, they believe in restraining oneself to achieve a higher form of being, and yet has to straight up defend something she hates because she loves her brother. And ANGELO CAN SEE IT. I WISH THERE WAS AN AFTERMATH WHERE WE SEE HER USING HER INTELLECT AND WORDS FOR HER ENDS. 

I truly think the second interview scene is one of the best exchanges Billy Shakes wrote. Because it ENDS LIKE THAT. GOD the david tennant one is chilling, the oregon shakespeare festival one is fucked. The 1976 which is the most psychosexual was so intensely disturbing that the Angelo got applause for it. IDK What that means and im too scared to ask. Idk how the RSC managed because youtbe doesnt show me that. The Repurcussion theatre was the most varied array of contradictions for angelo instead of just corrupt judge. It literally is all the shakespeare villains that do the most heinous things that Im like THATS MY FAVE. Iago was just RACISM/Sociopath and fifteen year old me was like YES HIM. I mean Richard III is bad but hes fun. ANGELO AT THE BEST IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR AND YET IM STILL LIKE WOW HOW COMPLEX ALSO THE ACTOR WAS SO GOOD LOOKING AND PLAYING UP THE BDSM BOTTOM ANGLE I WAS GONE. 

And the Isabellas go from wilting lily, to some sort of quiet and reserved girl, and the one i saw was literally “she is tiny but fierce” like her voice was really forceful and i thought it was amazing. 

THIS PLAY IS FUCKED WHEN IT COMES TO THESE READINGS LIVING SIDE BY SIDE BUT BOY IS THIS INTERESTING. 

if you made it this far wow holy shit. thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[friend-clarity]

Leftism poisons literature: Atwood’s  Handmaiden’s Tale

I once lived in a harem ... the property of a polygamous Afghan family.

I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan—a harem simply means the "women's quarters." It is forbidden territory to all men who are not relatives. If you can't leave without permission or without a male escort, you are in a harem and living in purdah.

After a 30-month courtship, I married the glamorous, wealthy, very Westernized, foreign student whom I first met at college when I was 18. We never once discussed religion. Not a word about Islam. He had not prepared me for what life would be like in his country, even temporarily. For example, he had never even mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children, that most Afghan women still wore burqas or heavy hijab, that I would be pressured to convert to Islam, and would have to live with my mother-in-law.

When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport—which I never saw again. Suddenly, I was the citizen of no country and had no rights. I had become the property of a polygamous Afghan family. I was not allowed out without a male escort, a male driver, and a female relative as my chaperones.

This marriage had transported me back to the 10th Century and trapped me there without a passport back to the future.

Gilead's system of pseudo-theocratic totalitarian control in both her novels and in the MGM/Hulu versions does not accurately reflect what is happening in America today; it mirrors what is happening in most Islamic countries, a fact that Atwood and her admirers are too politically correct to notice.

Gilead Resembles an Islamic Theocracy, not Trump's America Phyllis Chesler

The Handmaid’s Tale is Margaret Atwood’s canonical 1985 novel of theocratic totalitarianism, spiked, along with other dystopian classics like George Orwell’s “1984.” Atwood’s book takes place in a world where a clique of Christian fundamentalists have overthrown the United States government and instituted the rigidly patriarchal Republic of Gilead. Environmental calamity has left many people infertile, and an unfortunate class of women who can have children, the Handmaids, are stripped of their identities and consigned to reproductive slavery for the elite.

It's become fashionable to draw comparisons between the popular television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Donald Trump's America.

Margaret Atwood, whose work I have long admired, is now being hailed as a prophet. It is quite the phenomenon. According to the pundits, Atwood's 1985 work, The Handmaid's Tale, which Mary McCarthy once savaged, and the recently-published 2019 sequel, The Testaments, are dystopias which aptly describe the contemporary climate change crisis, toxic environments, the rise in infertility, and the enslavement of women in Trump's America.

Is this all Atwood is writing about? Do the increasing restrictions on abortion in America parallel the extreme misogyny of Gilead, the theocratic state in Atwood's saga? Is the unjust separation of mothers and children, a la Trump on the southern border, what Atwood has foretold? Every review and interview with Atwood that I could find strongly insists that this is the case.

Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, attributes the current popularity of The Handmaid's Tale to Trump's ascendancy. She writes: "It's hardly surprising that in 2016 the book resonated—particularly women—stunned that a brazen misogynist, given to fascist rhetoric and backed by religious fundamentalists was taking power."

Gilead-inspired handmaid outfits have become popular at anti-Trump rallies as far away as Poland.

... At the anti-Trump pro-women's rights marches around the country, some feminist protesters dressed like Handmaids in billowing, shapeless red dresses, their facial identities obscured by large, white Victorian-era bonnets, carrying signs that read: "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again" and "The Handmaid's Tale is not an instruction manual."

They have a point. Abortion rights are being steadily challenged and nearly eviscerated in the formerly slave-owning American states. Right-to-life lawyers insist that the protection of unborn children without any gestational markers is the law of the land. We now have free states and slave states in terms of access to high quality, insurance-funded abortions. Pregnant, drug-addicted women are being jailed for child abuse.

Gilead most reflects what is happening not in America, but in most Islamic countries.

However ... [t]here's another contemporary parallel that also gets scant attention. Gilead's system of pseudo-theocratic totalitarian control in both her novels and in the MGM/Hulu versions does not accurately reflect what is happening in America today; it mirrors what is happening in most Islamic countries, a fact that Atwood and her admirers are too politically correct to notice.

Obscuring one's individual identity, masking one's face, sequestering women at home, may have been true of many previous cultures and regimes. However, in this day forced niqabs (face veils) and burqas (head, face, and body bags) are mainly realities for women in Muslim countries and communities in the West. In Iran in July, three women were sentenced to a total of 55 years between them for protesting against the veil.

In July 2019, an Iranian court sentenced Yasaman Aryani (left), Monireh Arabshahi (center), and Mojgan Keshavarz to a total of 55 years in prison for protesting against the veil. In The Handmaid's Tale Atwood does mention Islam twice (to exonerate Muslims as the suspected mass murderers of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office in Gilead (p.174) and again in a reference to the "obsession with harems" on the part of allegedly Orientalist Western painters who did not understand that they were painting "boredom" (p.69). Atwood's quintessential Bad Guys are Caucasian, Bible-thumping, right wing, conservative, American Christians.

Where else but in the Islamic world do we see forced face veiling, forced child marriage, women confined to the home, polygamy (a "wife" and a "handmaid" under the same roof), male guardians and minders, cattle prod shocking, whipping, hand amputations, stoning, crazed vigilante mobs stomping and tearing people apart, and tortured corpses publicly displayed on city walls or hanging from cranes in order to terrify the populace? Or the torture murder of homosexuals? This is how Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, the Islamic Republics of Iran and Afghanistan, the tyrants of Somalia and Saudi Arabia, interpret, correctly or incorrectly, Sharia law.

How could all the reviewers not see what I so clearly see? Perhaps here's how.

A Kabul Bride's Tale

I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan—a harem simply means the "women's quarters." It is forbidden territory to all men who are not relatives. If you can't leave without permission or without a male escort, you are in a harem and living in purdah.

"I once lived in a harem ... the property of a polygamous Afghan family." After a 30-month courtship, I married the glamorous, wealthy, very Westernized, foreign student whom I first met at college when I was 18. We never once discussed religion. Not a word about Islam. He had not prepared me for what life would be like in his country, even temporarily. For example, he had never even mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children, that most Afghan women still wore burqas or heavy hijab, that I would be pressured to convert to Islam, and would have to live with my mother-in-law.

When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport—which I never saw again. Suddenly, I was the citizen of no country and had no rights. I had become the property of a polygamous Afghan family. I was not allowed out without a male escort, a male driver, and a female relative as my chaperones.

This marriage had transported me back to the 10th Century and trapped me there without a passport back to the future.

I experienced what it was like to live with people who were permanently afraid of what other people might think—even more so than in Small Mind Town, USA.

Read more about the author's captivity in Afghanistan in her acclaimed 2013 book.

I was terrified when I first saw women wearing ghostly burqas—ambulatory body bags, sensory deprivation isolation chambers—huddled together literally at the back of the bus. My Afghan family laughed at my over-reaction, which was considered abnormal, not their practice of burying women alive.

My dreamer-of-a husband kept assuring me that the dreadful burqa and my captivity would both soon pass. He lived to see this dream come true for about 15 years for the middle classes until it was shattered again, perhaps forever.

Many Afghan women have mothers-in-law who beat them and treat them as despised servants. Mine never hit me or ordered me to cook or clean, but she tried to convert me to Islam every single day and tried to kill me by telling the servants to stop boiling my water and washing my fruits and vegetables. I got deathly ill.

Poor woman, she was a deserted and much maligned first wife. She feared me, envied me, hated me—as a woman, an infidel, a Jew, an American, and mainly, as a "love match," something considered too dangerously Western. Afghan mothers-in-law do collaborate in or even perpetrate the honor/horror killings of their daughters and daughters-in-law. So do rural India-based Hindu mothers and mothers-in-law, Muslim mothers and mothers-in-law world-wide, and Sikhs, to a lesser extent.

I got out of the wild, wild East and I moved on. But I never forgot the way it was. I always understood that as imperfect as America and the West might be, it was still a much better place for women than the Islamic world. Forever after, I understood that barbaric customs are indigenous, not caused by foreign intervention; and that, like the West, Islam was also an imperial and colonial power, owned slaves, and engaged in gender and religious apartheid.

I owe Afghanistan a great deal for teaching me this. Perhaps my radical Western feminism was forged long ago in pampered purdah in Kabul.

The Real Face of Gilead

Islamic or Islamist totalitarianism today and as I knew it nearly 60 years ago in Kabul is the more obvious face of Gilead than the one imagined by Atwood more than 30 years ago.

Like the handmaids and domestics in Gilead, the captive population in Orwell's 1984 is monitored around the clock through "telescreens" that can view every room, each person. The telescreens broadcast Big Brother's orders and conduct daily "hate" sessions. People are always anxious and paranoid; everyone has permanent enemies.

Today, Orwell's Thought Police sound a lot like the Afghan Taliban or like Iran's or Saudi Arabia's Virtue­ and-Vice squads, who arrest men and women for the smallest sign of "individuality" or difference, and who harass and arrest women for showing a single strand of hair, or a glimpse of ankle. Here's Khaled Hosseini's fictional description of life in Afghanistan under the Soviets in The Kite Runner:

You couldn't trust anyone in Kabul anymore—for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend...the rafiqs, the [Afghan] comrades, were everywhere and they'd split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn't...A casual remark to the tailor while getting fitted for a suit might land you in the dungeons of Poleh-charkhi...Even at the dinner table, in the privacy of their own home, people had to speak in a calculated manner—the rafiqs were in the classrooms too; they'd taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.

And here he is describing Afghanistan in the Taliban era:

In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadiums, in the markets, it is a part of our lives here...the savages who rule our watan [country] don't care about human decency. The other day, I accompanied Farzanajan to the bazaar to buy some potatoes and naan. She asked the vendor how much the potatoes cost, but he did not hear her, I think he had a deaf ear. So she asked louder and suddenly a young Talib ran over and hit her on the thighs with his wooden stick. He struck her so hard she fell down. He was screaming at her and cursing and saying the Ministry of Vice and Virtue does not allow women to speak loudly. She had a large purple bruise on her leg for days...If I fought, that dog would have surely put a bullet in me, and gladly!

Hosseini's descriptions are right out of 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale.

Two memoirs set in Iran, Azar Nafisi's best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran and Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No, describe the savage curtailment of private life and thought—and of life itself—by radical Islamists.

Two compelling accounts of life for women in Iran's Islamic Republic. According to Nafisi, Khomeini's goon squads closed news­papers and universities and arrested, tortured, and executed beloved teachers, prominent artists, intellectuals, and activists, including feminists, and thousands of other innocent and productive Muslims. The squads constantly harassed women on the street and at work. If a woman failed the dress-code standards even slightly, or by accident, she risked being arrested, probably raped, probably executed.

In Journey from the Land of No, Roya Hakakian describes the in­describable "Mrs. Moghadam," the newly-installed head of the Jewish girls' high school. Mrs. Moghadam tyrannizes, terrifies, and shames the Jewish girls. She tries to convert them to Islam. However, her true passion is more Talibanesque. She informs the innocent girls that, although they do not know it, they are "diabolical," "abominable," "loathsome," "lethal," capable of "drowning everything in eternal dark­ness," capable of bringing the "apocalypse" by showing a single strand of hair. To Hakakian's credit, she presents a rather dangerous turn of events as a dark comedy.

Mrs. Moghadam is definitely an Aunt Lydia, the lead female tormentor of the Handmaids, right out of Gilead, circa 1985.

Many Western feminists mistakenly see the face veil and head scarf as symbols of anti-racism.

As Muslim women are being tortured, honor-murdered by their families, or stoned to death, sometimes for refusing to wear the veil, many Western multiculturally and politically correct post-colonial feminists are deconstructing and wearing the face veil and the head scarf as symbols of anti-racism and as a form of respect when they visit Muslim countries. Such feminists are also silencing and demonizing all other views in academic journals, in the media, and on feminist internet groups.

I've written about this many times. Therefore, while I know that violence against women still remains a burning issue in the West, I agree with Allison Pearson's recent article in The Spectator: "The appalling vanity of Western Feminists who think Margaret Atwood writes about them."

Atwood depicts an all-female power structure in which the handmaids are kept in line by cruel female "Aunts," led by Aunt Lydia, who casually apply cattle prods and tasers, who blame them as evil sluts, punish them with group condemnation, bouts of solitary confinement, exile them to the "Colonies" to die cleaning up toxic waste, etc. Such behavior seems to contradict feminist views of women as morally superior to men and as more compassionate and intuitive.

Aunt Lydia (left) and the al-Khansa Brigade of ISIS Like men, women are human beings and as such are as close to the apes as to the angels. Women are also aggressive, cruel, competitive, envious, sometimes lethally so, but mainly toward other women. I would not want to be at the mercy of a female prison guard—or a female concentration camp guard—in the West. But let's not forget the Wives of ISIS—the all-female al-Khansaa Brigade who whipped, beat, and mutilated the breasts of girls and women when their heavy black burqas slipped. Displaced ISIS women continue their anti-woman reign of terror.

Misogynist thinking and actions exist in America today but not only among right-wing conservatives. It is also flourishing among our media and academic elites. Such thinking is flying high under the banner of "free speech," "multi-cultural relativism," "anti-racism," and "political correctness." Dare to question this elite's right to silence and shame those who challenge their views—i.e., that the West is always to blame, that jihadists are freedom-fighters, that the Islamic face veil is a free choice or a religious commandment, that polygamy encourages sisterhood, that Islam is a race, not a religious and political ideology—and, as I've noted many times, one is attacked as a racist, an Islamophobe, and a conservative, and swiftly demonized and de-platformed.

While MGM/Hulu's TV series is dramatically compelling, part soap opera, part horror movie, part Warrior Queen fantasy, the series is radically different from Atwood's 1985 novel. For example, Atwood's narrator, Ofglen, is not an increasingly daring, crazed, female assassin, as Elizabeth Moss brilliantly plays her. She is hardly heroic at all; under totalitarianism, heroism, collective or individual, is quickly ferreted out and destroyed. It exists but is rare.

Contemporary viewers are hungry for multi-racial characters, interracial and same-sex couples, "badass" women. Hulu gives them to us. Hulu's Canada is a multi-racial, politically correct refuge for Gilead's escapees; same-sex couples and feminists are government leaders. This is not true in the novel. On the contrary, in her 1985 Epilogue, Atwood has Canada rounding up and returning all Gilead escapees.

Media and academic elites are playing partisan politics with Atwood's original vision.

Atwood the divine novelist is absolutely entitled to depict whatever she wishes. But the current crop of reviewers as well as the filmmakers are playing partisan politics with her original vision and are refusing to see other and larger global dangers contained in her work.

Women's freedom and women's lives worldwide are under the most profound siege. To focus solely on the United States or on the Caucasian, Judeo-Christian West is diversionary. It scapegoats one country, one culture, for the far greater crimes of other countries and cultures.

Phyllis Chesler, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is an emerita professor of psychology and women's studies and the author of eighteen books, including Women and Madness, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, An American Bride in Kabul, and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

Notes:

[1] Commercial surrogacy has been outlawed in India, Thailand, parts of Mexico, Malaysia, and South Africa, as well as in many European countries including Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, and the UK. Hence, the campaign to legalize commercial surrogacy in America has gathered momentum.

[2] Contemporary surrogacy has now become a way of slicing and dicing biological motherhood into three parts: an egg donor, who undergoes painful and dangerous IVF procedures; a "gestational" mother who faces all the risks of pregnancy, childbirth, and potentially negative and lifelong medical and psychiatric consequences; and an adoptive mother or father. This vivisection of motherhood makes it impossible for a birthmother to win custody for any reason.

[sagebodisattva]

Antinatalism and Nihilism

Yeah. In case you didn't know, or were somehow a bit unsure about whether or not antinatalism was a nihilist philosophy, antinatalism is perplexingly nihilist, nihilistic supreme; that means it's the grand chalupa, with fresh sour cream.

The most standard commonly known definition of nihilism is a philosophical doctrine that suggests the negation of one or more reputedly meaningful aspects of life. If nay you say, then are you implying that antinatalism isn't asking it's prospective antinatalist to negate certain values that the majority of humans all share in common? I mean, it is called antinatalism, isn't it? Asking a human to consciously avoid procreating, whether just, correct, most moral, or not, this is still a value subtraction equation. The idea that consciousness is better off to never have existed is certainly a negative value conclusion, even if you twist around the narrative to demonize the perceived opposition.

If some condition independent of consciousness that exists out there in the universe is somehow a morally BETTER configuration, in all it's independently existing isolated betterness, without anything existing, any unavoidable prognosis, prescription, or proscription, that may be proposed, will all be subtraction transactions. That's antinatalism, and that's the common understood consensus as to what the definition of nihilism is. There's no way around it. If you’re an antinatalist, then you are at least nihilistic. Period.

Yeah. A dirty stinking value negating nihilist.

And I understand why antinatalists want to reject nihilism, for, while suggesting the negation of a commonly held meaningful value, they do so under the banner of a righteous pro-value. Which is all well and good, but it still doesn't change the fact that it's aim is still to negate a value.

And I'm not against antinatalism, in fact I agree that, for people who are serious about discovering the truth about reality and seek to walk the path of self recognition, of which, is the only existential function for why we are here, procreation isn't helpful. It's an investment, which is a distraction, and that's passing the buck to someone else. And for the people who are NOT serious about reality, the truth and self recognition, you definitely shouldn't be procreating either, because you are just recklessly creating giant amounts of demand and deprivation just for it's own sake, and that isn't a requirement. If one is not seeking to understand the reality, then why should one be ignorantly pushing more lives into existence, for the mere sake of selfish gratification? It's an abuse of power. You don't have any way to obtain consent for the life you are causing to manifest, so therefor this is indicative of an immoral act, like it or not.

And I know there are a lot of people out there that are grateful to have been pushed into existence and appreciate it deeply, but just ask yourself, for what? Pleasure seeking activities? Is that what it is? Just raw hedonism? Back dropped against a life of mundane routine and pointless empty lives of quiet desperation and frustrating futility? To endure large amounts of suffering, boredom and tedious undertakings, just to have a small sip of ecstasy? It seems that we have forgotten that this realm should be treated as a training ground, and not like a lounge for fat cats and lazy lizards.

I won't go too far into depth about the positive aspects of choosing not to procreate, perhaps reserving these thoughts for a future video, for the main idea of this exposition is to show how antinatalism is a nihilistic philosophy. As if antinatalism was somehow something else other then nihilism? Yeah right. If you think so, then you must somehow have your narrative about the logic twisted up.

I know, I know, you have a certain subjective feeling about certain facts, and since the fact is a fact, how you feel about those facts must also be facts! I know, I know. Anything less would be a case of mental illness.

But, one should always try to understand who one's allies are. And one should also try real hard to try and stop maligning and demonizing an adjacent ally; in exactly the same way everyone else tries to malign and demonize you. Atheism, antinatalism, nihilism, post modernism, deconstructionism, futurism, transhumanism, are all relative philosophies existing within the same ideology cluster, despite having some differences. Maybe what they all share in common, in a broad sense, is a rejection of an old world and an old way of doing things.

You do know that, in theism's mind, atheism, and thereby also antinatalism by default, are considered nihilist philosophies simply because they both reject theism. And you know that this is where nihilism primarily got it's bad name from. It was a label frequently used to malign those that rejected theism. And I say 'antinatalism by default" because I think it's safe to assume that if you are antinatalist, you certainly can't be any kind of theist worth his salt. What kind of theist would think that being fruitful isn't in accord with a sky daddy's wishes? Unless there are theists out there, that I don't know about, who believe in an incompetent fucked up god who can't be trusted, but if that's the case, why bother with remaining a theist? Overthrow that motherfucker. If believing in a loving all powerful god, while having an attitude that the world is too fucked up a place to bring children into, isn't cognitive dissonance, then what is?

And I wonder, just as a side note, who was worse for the theists; the atheists, the heretics, or the nihilists?

But anyway... Yeah. Antinatalism is a form of nihilism. So it's truly quite very bizarre that antinatalism tries to take the high road; goes holier then thou, and plays the role of moral warden against another philosophy that, in fact, represents some of the same concepts and positions.

Nihilists advocate victimization and/or ignoring victimization? Bullshit. That isn't even the case, so it isn't true in the first place. It isn't nihilists who are the ones responsible for the horrors of the world, nor the ones ignoring the horrors. So maybe instead of trying to straw man a scapegoat, antinatalism should either redirect this false characterization right back from whence it came, or try focusing the vitriol upon that which is more befitting of these tragic poetic condemnations. It would seem to me that Theists and statists are the violators of innate human morals.

And don't let the religious aspect of theism create some false sense of a dichotomy existing between theism and it's slave atheism. They are both materialists. Only one is justified by a belief in God, and the other is justified by a lack of a belief in God. The "materials" are on a pedestal in both of these so called diametrically opposed polar opposite positions. And post hence, they are both full of shit. Neither one of them are automatically morally upright. Religion, do we even need to go there? If Jesus came back he'd kick the shit out of the Christians; once he matrixed around their gunfire. And atheism, well where does one exactly derive morality when there isn't some scary supernatural force threatening you, or offering obedience rewards, in a world where cash is king; and only the collection and hoarding of objects and resources are the measure of one's well being? From whereforth, and unto what?

Oh, I know. From empathy. From compassion. From a sense of charity. From a sense of duty, integrity, justice, service, and heroic Herculean honor. Only, this sense of duty is easily derelict when it comes to the raw material reality. In a game of heavy investments and gambling with the margins of profit and loss, wherein the consequence of ignoring dysfunction and not running the risk to do what's called "right", is rewarded by sustaining a retainer of wealth and resources, the objectively morally thing to do, is to do what most benefits yourself and your immediate group. And that's what I mean when I say “objectively moral.” I mean so in the sense that, there will be groups of individuals who feel they have a special status to make decisions on behalf of everyone else, because this self elected special status also affords one a superior perspective to decide and execute what's BEST for everyone...

Sound familiar? And it isn't nihilism that is doing this. It's hard materialism; cause, hey, its logical, it's objectively moral, it's very utilitarian, all of which the nihilist knows, doesn't really exist, and therefor doesn't invest into the motivated fervor of this material passion play. And yet the criminal trouble making shit stirrer uppers have the audacity to point out at the audience and blame them for the stage theatrics. And antinatalism, who sits in section B, points over to section A, where nihilism sits, and passes the blame on to them. It's a joke.

But I can see why everyone's so upset with nihilism. True nihilism upsets the whole apple cart. The passion whores don't want people to resign and give up on the Game of the lemmings, cause jeez, what would happen if everyone became nihilists? It would be unprofitable. We'd have a bunch of peaceful generous self sufficient people who had relaxed forgiving caregiving dispositions, who mind their own business, but share and help others, and who don't want to victimize their fellow humans. And we couldn't have that now, could we? Pointing the finger at you and saying it's all your fault, is so much more convenient and fun!