Has Something Akin to The Handmaid's Tale Actually Happened Throughout History?

[righteous_path]

Aside from the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah, which still isn't a true 1:1 parallel, I can't think of a single case where a religious cult took over a country and established an all-encompassing legal system built around enslaving women, assigning them rigid social castes, and confining them to breeding camps.

The premise is unbelievably elaborate. It's the kind of scenario you could only pull from a dystopian novel, which is exactly what The Handmaid's Tale is. It's essentially fear porn designed to make women, particularly white women, fear their own men.

I've never met a single woman from the Global South who's anxious that something this absurd could happen to her. They already live in societies where men hold authority within the family, and they generally trust men to provide for and protect them rather than fear them.

This obsession honestly seems like a white Western phenomenon. Everywhere else, people have far more immediate concerns than imagining a dystopian fantasy where their own men suddenly turn them into state-owned breeding stock.

 

[NonNTFailure]

Most Hollywood movies are really just propaganda pieces (many of which were even made by the CIA...)

 

[SmhChan]

After about a year of getting blackpilled, this is the sort of conclusion I reached without ever reading The Handmaid’s Tale or the biblical story you referenced.

Foids are so hostile to men that it’s a net negative to co-habit with them. The sex and “manufactured intimacy” aren’t worth it in “trad” society where foids aren’t economically independent. They would still hold power due to their control over men.

What’s crazy is that apparently the foids in the novel are discarded after they’re done breeding, which is exactly the thought I also have in mind in a post-gender-conflict society where the male-female dynamics are completely overwritten.

Ultimately, it was a foid who understood foids are nothing beyond their breeding holes. It’s only men who just harp on about “muh eggs and wombs are more expensive.”

 

[The Notorious SLAV]

Nope, never. If I were in the mood to troll potential leftist lurkers, I'd say that the plot of that novel has uncanny similarities to inactivity against climate change, at least from how leftists present it (as in, leftists present climate change as an incoming catastrophic process that is not being done anything about because of resistance to doing so from privileged elites and due to people caring about irrelevant political stuff. In this view, in Handmaid's Tale, you could say that the sterility plague is the climate change-style apocalyptic threat, and the people resisting Gilead's pro-natalist policies are short-sighed fools dooming humanity to collapse or extinction because they don't like what they personally would have to do to help save humanity.), but that's for another time.

Honestly, the more I think of the plot of that novel, the more comically it fails as a dystopia. Its fundamental flaw is that, in the end, there is a very good reason for all of those restrictive and pro-natalist policies. The sterility plague is very real, and its effects are certain to be catastrophic, something which is only proven in the novel's epilogue which heavily implies that the white race had gone extinct in North America, and the continent is now ruled by Indigenous nations which study the extinct white cultures.

Atwood could've simply made the sterility thing be a made-up government propaganda, and in that case it actually would be a dystopia, but instead, she made a book that is an excellent look into upper-class white women's utterly solipsistic worldview. If the only chance for their country to survive a crisis is for all such women who can to give all they can, even their lives, for it, then, in Atwood's and countless other feminists' view, the extinction of that country is the preferred outcome to those privileged white women being inconvenienced in any way, and such a society deserves to be scorned, as it is by the Indigenous scholars i nthe epilogue, for having had the gall to expect those rich white women to give away their comfy lives and try saving it.

When I think of that story, I increasingly think of what is probably the closest real-life gender-swapped (of course) counterpart to that novel's purely fictional scenario. That is, 90% of Paraguayan male population being wiped out in the War of the Triple Alliance. As far as traditional gender roles go, the entire male population of a country being mobilized is the perfect counterpart to the idea of the entire female population capable of being pregnant getting so. The former actually happened, and is a historical footnote nobody cares about except out of curiosity, since it happened to people who have minimal status in society and who people are happy to see dead (ugly and poor ethnic men). The latter is a purely fictional scenario, with said fictional scenario presuming that the entire world will revolve around the issue, that the moral worth of their society will be judged purely by how it handles that issue, and with the people who imagine it happening to them believing that they will be completely justified and in full right to let the world go to hell for daring to expect from them to do it (from what I've read on TVTropes, Gilead in the show is sending women (or jsut their children with the foreign men) to third countries which don't want to start their own fertility programs, with the heroes of course hating it, which is hilarious since in racial terms, it just boils down to white women telling poor ethnics that they don't deserve to exist if their way of continuing to exist would inconvenience those privileged white women, and that they deserve to see their countries go extinct if they dare to expect white women to do anything to save them).

 

[St3v3Cel]

Nope, never. If I were in the mood to troll potential leftist lurkers, I'd say that the plot of that novel has uncanny similarities to inactivity against climate change, at least from how leftists present it (as in, leftists present climate change as an incoming catastrophic process that is not being done anything about because of resistance to doing so from privileged elites and due to people caring about irrelevant political stuff. In this view, in Handmaid's Tale, you could say that the sterility plague is the climate change-style apocalyptic threat, and the people resisting Gilead's pro-natalist policies are short-sighed fools dooming humanity to collapse or extinction because they don't like what they personally would have to do to help save humanity.), but that's for another time.

Honestly, the more I think of the plot of that novel, the more comically it fails as a dystopia. Its fundamental flaw is that, in the end, there is a very good reason for all of those restrictive and pro-natalist policies. The sterility plague is very real, and its effects are certain to be catastrophic, something which is only proven in the novel's epilogue which heavily implies that the white race had gone extinct in North America, and the continent is now ruled by Indigenous nations which study the extinct white cultures.

Atwood could've simply made the sterility thing be a made-up government propaganda, and in that case it actually would be a dystopia, but instead, she made a book that is an excellent look into upper-class white women's utterly solipsistic worldview. If the only chance for their country to survive a crisis is for all such women who can to give all they can, even their lives, for it, then, in Atwood's and countless other feminists' view, the extinction of that country is the preferred outcome to those privileged white women being inconvenienced in any way, and such a society deserves to be scorned, as it is by the Indigenous scholars i nthe epilogue, for having had the gall to expect those rich white women to give away their comfy lives and try saving it.

When I think of that story, I increasingly think of what is probably the closest real-life gender-swapped (of course) counterpart to that novel's purely fictional scenario. That is, 90% of Paraguayan male population being wiped out in the War of the Triple Alliance. As far as traditional gender roles go, the entire male population of a country being mobilized is the perfect counterpart to the idea of the entire female population capable of being pregnant getting so. The former actually happened, and is a historical footnote nobody cares about except out of curiosity, since it happened to people who have minimal status in society and who people are happy to see dead (ugly and poor ethnic men). The latter is a purely fictional scenario, with said fictional scenario presuming that the entire world will revolve around the issue, that the moral worth of their society will be judged purely by how it handles that issue, and with the people who imagine it happening to them believing that they will be completely justified and in full right to let the world go to hell for daring to expect from them to do it (from what I've read on TVTropes, Gilead in the show is sending women (or jsut their children with the foreign men) to third countries which don't want to start their own fertility programs, with the heroes of course hating it, which is hilarious since in racial terms, it just boils down to white women telling poor ethnics that they don't deserve to exist if their way of continuing to exist would inconvenience those privileged white women, and that they deserve to see their countries go extinct if they dare to expect white women to do anything to save them).

High IQ observations about that book. I ended up reading it randomly years ago, but had no idea that it was a feminist book until after I had finished reading it. Here is my hazy recalling of The Handmaid's Tale, and why I read it:

Wow, that meme summarises that book very well . Like I said before, I had no idea what I was getting into when I read it. At the time I was checking out hard Sci-Fi books like Greg Egan and similar, and I saw many people on Soyditt recommending Margaret Atwood as another good Sci-Fi author. That's why I thought The Handmaid's Tale might be worth reading. I didn't think much of the cover or the title going in, I assumed that it would be some kind of metaphor since the supposed genre was "Sci-Fi", but I guess I should have known better given that most foid authors aren't any good.

From what I remember from the book, it was much like that meme. It basically starts off with the Becky protagonist arriving at a farm of sorts, where she's going to be one of three wives for a man high up in the government. She's going to be the wife who bears his children, meanwhile the other two wives take care of everything else in the household.

There's a lot of staring into the wall and completely empty introspection from the Becky protagonist before the impregnation scenes starts, as referenced in the meme. Several attempts are made by the betabuxx government man but the Becky never becomes pregnant. After a while the other two wives decide that the Becky protagonist should cuck her government husband, and instead be impregnated by a Chad workhand at the farm. She does this, and probably becomes pregnant finally.

After that there's dreamy flashbacks to the Becky protagonist and her dyke friend, who grew up just before this three-wife system and so on would be enacted in the US. Her dyke friend rebelled against these changes, and were taken away, her current wherabouts and status unknown to the Becky protagonist.

Once the Becky protagonist gets some respect around the farm, she gets to go out and visit the city occasionally. On one of these trips there are some tourist Chinese girls or similar, who are dressed scantily, and can walk around freely in the city as if it's an amusement park. Those tourist girls take some kind of picture of themselves. The Becky protagonist observes this and is reminded of how much the US has changed, how she used to be like those girls. Or she might not have observed that, I don't remember. Either way I remember this as being a strange but memorable scene in the book.

Eventually some other foid reveals herself to be some kind of resistance member to the Becky protagonist. The Becky joins the resistance, and joins the company of this resistance foid when she takes trips into the city. One one of these trips there is some kind of public execution of male sympathisers to this resistance movement. Oh and yeah, the Chad workhand was probably also a resistance member.

Somehow the Becky protagonist is taken to some brothel hotel that all the government people apparently use. There she finds her old dyke friend, who probably dies shortly after, I don't remember.

After that things go haywire, but nothing is really clear. It is not clear if the Becky protagonist is caught and dies, or if the resistance is shut down or wins, but something like that happens. It is up for interpretation. At the end there's an extra page which says that The Handmaid's Tale itself was told by the Becky protagonist on an audiotape, and that they are analysing it to understand their own history, and this is far in the future of the events of the book. I guess the idea there was to justify the dreamy, odd and unclear things as being missing entries in the audiotapes.

Either way I did think it was interesting enough to keep reading until the end, but if I knew that this is all it was about I would have never finished it, and I would never read it again. What kept me going was my hope that it would have some cool Sci-Fi idea in it or similar, but it never came. Both the story and the writing style was very wonky, slow and uneventful really.

Once I looked up the motivation behind the book being that Margaret Atwood thought that the world in this book is what all men apparently secretely wanted, it made a little more sense. Of course that's anything but true, I think it should be clear to anyone that this is like a typical foid gooner fantasy, really. In reality it's very clearly all about being a foid who has loads of attention on her, both by women and other men and so on. Atwood apparently on the other hand claims that the inspiration behind the book was about making an accurate prediction of the future, according to research about the world she has done.

It's impressive that you've read 50 Shades Of Grey and similar, I don't think I could handle going into a book like this knowingly, even though foid books are excellent blackpill sources. I did however used to observe how women act between themselves online, but I have a difficult time wanting to understand foid minds in depth these days. Trying to comprehend everything about women is damaging to the psyche, because they are so vile.

TL;DR: my summary of The Handmaid's Tale's story. I read it many years ago, so I probably misremembered a few things. If you're interested in learning about it my recalling of it might be useful though. I think very few people have actually read it all the way through, even the feminists who give it a lot of lip service. I don't they would associate it as heavily with feminism if they actually read it as is.