Thread by @Delafina777

people keep acting like the Stepford Wives was satire instead of what men would actually do if they had the power

https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1385255020237508615

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"