Um, all of them? Especially since some of them happened already within living memory?
“Monthly religious rape ceremonies” are already happening. Probably more than monthly. It’s called being in a marriage your family and community won’t let you out of.
I know women whose access to money they’ve bloody earned was cut off by their husbands. It’s not a leap at all for it to happen large-scale. Something like already has happened recently in places like Afghanistan.
Ditto the physical punishments. These are all things happening right now, many of them in North America, in small pockets. They all could go mainstream.
And if you think that’s farfetched, remember when the book came out in the 80s, everyone was joking that the Moral Majority were just a noisy minority. A bunch of religious nutters with some Sunday afternoon religious TV shows.
Now they control the Congress, Senate, and White House.
You either seriously don’t understand the point of speculative fiction, or you’re being intentionally obtuse. I’m willing to believe it’s some combination of the two.
Nobody would write speculative fiction that has no relevance to the real world, and is just a little fantasy that they spun up in their fevered little imaginations. Even if they did, nobody would read it, because it would be completely unrelatable. The Handmaid’s Tale, on the other hand, was extremely well-received, being nominated for a Man Booker Prize and a Nebula Award and winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award, among numerous other nominations and accolades. Most readers saw current and past events reflected in this book, and Margaret Atwood herself had this to say:
'You could say it’s a response to ‘it can’t happen here.’
But men who have never read her book are talking about it, so she should shut up and know her place I guess.
Hello? These happen or have happened in the United States, and the Government has either sponsored them or turned a blind eye. The US has capital punishment, just like Iran and Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t matter to me that we use lethal injections, firing squads, and electrocution instead of stoning, or drawing and quartering, or whatever, because it’s a fucking barbaric practice and it needs to stop.
Also, we’re at a period in history with comparatively few lynchings, but lynchings used to be big family events with cookouts and commemorative postcards for sale. These were technically extrajudicial executions… technically… but do you think the perpetrators faced justice?
There have been protesters viciously attacked by government forces during our lifetimes. In fact, even during last year. Look how protesters were treated at Standing Rock. There was no machine gunning there, but there were people maimed, and there was chaos everywhere. If you want examples of people getting gunned down in the US by government forces in your lifetime, look at the Kent State shootings. That was still fresh in people’s minds when Atwood wrote this in the early 80s.
Civil asset forfeiture is indeed a thing. It’s not as brazen as it is in the book, and not directed mainly at women, but it’s still pretty brazen. This, and the prison-industrial complex, is a thing, and it goes without saying that the prison-industrial complex is a stopgap replacement for slavery. You want to talk about forfeiture of assets? Look no further than slavery, and the people who want to bring it back.
Both happen in the US but are not government sponsored. Have you heard of the Jeffs family and the FLDS Church, by any chance? They’re probably one of the more famous examples of large-scale systemic kidnapping and cult indoctrination, but are far from the only examples. I have known several people who have escaped from cults and whose lives were destroyed in the process. Also, what use is being in a cult if you can’t rape whomever you want whenever you want? I assure you, religious rape ceremonies occur in cults, oftentimes more often than monthly.
As far as genital mutilation for treating homosexuality, FGM is a thing in much of Africa and is practiced by Christians and Muslims alike. It’s a cultural thing, not practiced in the US to any large extent, but we’ve borrowed from other cultures in the past so there’s nothing stopping us from borrowing this little practice as well.
Also, are you aware that gay conversion therapy is most assuredly practiced in the US, and is only banned in nine states?
Ah, this is a Brown People Problem ™. This is the sort of shit that Boko Haram (literally, Western Education Is Forbidden) does. It doesn’t happen here, but do you really think it couldn’t? Do you really think we’re so superior to the Darkest Africans that we couldn’t do exactly what they do? Do you think America is exceptional?
There is one race. The Human Race. We can’t write off something another culture does. When any of us commits atrocities, it affects us all.
Dude, that’s like the second time in a couple of weeks that you have:
Entered into a discussion on a topic related to gender inequality.
Espoused a point of view that is contrary to, even dismissive of the consensus.
Failed to acknowledge anyone’s take on the subject but your own.
When challenged, you doubled down.
When that didn’t work, you bailed.
Does that not at all give you pause to reflect? It’s like you have a pressing urge to teach, but you have no desire to learn. Or maybe you’re just invested in your own point of view and you’re shopping around for anyone who’ll validate it? I mean, you did cite publicity from a porn website as if it were a scientific study, because it sorta kinda maybe lined up with the point you wanted to make. That’s probably not a good sign either, is it?
Or maybe you’re right! Maybe you’re right about everything and it’s only your bedside manner that needs work.
Either way, I think it would do you good to pause and reflect, and see if you can do better.
Dammit, now you’re making me wonder about SF that’s just a total lark and has no real connection to the real world (and is/was successful on a decent scale). The only one that comes to mind for me is Pride of Chanur by CJ Cherryh… it’s sort of Cherryh’s usual space opera, but with spacefaring lionesses (male lions aren’t really team players, although that gets explored too!). The story is triggered by the capture of a single spacefaring human, but all in all, it’s a book followed by a trilogy set in a region of space completely remote from Earth populated by characters that don’t really share human values.
Any others come to mind? Just looking for total escapism here. Also, it feels like this discussion could go in a different thread…
I’d like to add that marital rape wasn’t even a crime in America until 1993. Even today, South Carolina only considers forcible intercourse with your spouse to be a crime if there is “excessive violence” used. So I’m not seeing how it’s so unbelievable that “monthly religious rape” ceremonies could be government-sponsored. The law of the land said that once you were married, you’d given your consent for all time. Until 1993.
My daughter read the Handmaid’s Tale a while ago and has Oryx and Crake on on the list for reading this summer. I never got around to the next couple of books that came after that. I think I’m going to read the Robber’s Bride next, once I’m done with the book I’m reading about neoliberalism.
The more I think about this, the more I wonder about the underlying assumption.
IF it were true that the entire world stopped having easy fertility (whether or not that’s really the case in this particular story)…does that mean it would then be reasonable to systematically torture and rape women to force them to have babies against their will?
(Also, to not allow women to keep their own children? Or any woman, fertile or not, to read or write? Or earn a paycheck for herself? Etc. etc. But let’s just stick with the most direct issue for now.)
Under what circumstances would it be understandable to do this to 51% of the population?
Most of the SF that gets described as “escapism” are actually power fantasies. Which tend to be very clearly influenced by the modern cultural context, albeit usually in a reactionary way.
And that the President’s lawyer was arguing that it wasn’t a crime only two years ago.
We’ve also got a large chunk of the neofascist bastards (Moldbug, VD, Roosh, etc) openly calling for the end of women’s suffrage and sexual autonomy. They are literally, explicitly arguing for rape to be legal.
Even the old school stuff can be eye rolling. I need to hop back into them but I have been working my way through the Lensman books. Granted the target audience seems to be 13 years old but oh boy the ‘Fair hiared, blue eyed, super smart, super manly, always has the right gadget, and always moral and upright space hero’ gets old. On the plus side while the humans seem to be uniformly white ubermenches they interact with all the alien races with equality and respect. Still they are pulpy fun in small doses.
