Like, men resent every bit of power or independence women get, especially if they're making money from men.
Women are influencers with male audiences?
No, no, replace them with literal sex dolls that men puppet. Keep that money in the hands of men.
No matter how well women, as entertainers, divest themselves of their personalities and provide an alluring blank slate for men to project upon, men always have that bothersome knowledge that there IS actually a person in there.
So, stamp it out. Replace them with dolls or AI.
For me, the most horrifying part of the Handmaid's Tale wasn't even the society itself. It was that as it was coming into being, Offred's partner was just like, "it's okay, honey, hand over your money to me, it'll be fine."
The book captured really well that tiny voice of doubt that I think many women don't want to admit they have about their partners. Like, we all want to believe, if we're dating a man, that we found one who genuinely loves us as human beings.
But for me, what makes the Handmaid's Tale really effective horror is those flashbacks to "real-world" society *becoming* a society in which women are essentially reduced to being domestic animals, and that even the men who seem like loving partners are okay with it happening.
And that the farther it goes, the more into it they get.
The Handmaid's Tale is one of the most deeply cynical about human nature books I've ever read, because it isn't about men raised in Gilead treating women as subhuman broodmares and sex dolls.
It's men raised during the civil rights era.
I hate zombie fiction, not because the idea of getting bitten or killed by a zombie bothers me, but because the idea of someone I *care* about and trust getting bitten and turning into an enemy makes me sad-scared.
And that's always been the horror I found in the Handmaid's Tale and the Stepford Wives.
The idea that people you love will happily let you be turned into a sex-slave/broodmare, or killed and replaced with a robot.
And it's that same thing in action here: that if men are given the choice, how many of them prefer an automaton as a partner instead of an actual human being?
and dudes, I'm blocking any of you that Kool-Aid Man through the wall to NotAllMen
you should know by now that my default setting for men I don't know is "probably should just block them"
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I don’t really know the origins of this one, but I can tell you how it’s played out in the modern era.
So, the Victorians liked to divide humanity up into broad racial groups, which supposedly were “scientific” and were supposed to have various genetic attributes. (Phrenology was a big part of this.)
If I see another fucking "millennials are causing a housing shortage by buying houses" headline...
like sorry, last month we were wrecking the world by living in our parents' basements, so I'm having trouble keeping up with what we are and aren't supposed to do
and somehow, weirdly, it's millennials causing the housing shortage problem by buying homes and not
<checks notes>
the older people not selling their houses?
Like I don't know how to explain to these headline writers that "supply" is part of the supply and demand equation
Like, especially for women, it’s okay to like and be proud of your creative output. It’s okay to think it’s good. It’s okay to accept compliments about it.
Normalize liking your own work.
Like I get really sick of the whole “my divine dissatisfaction makes me more alive than the peons” model of creativity.
It’s REALLY close to the Asshole Genius.
Plenty of artists are healthy people who aren’t abusive to themselves, others, or both.