One of the reasons there is so much blame and shame, so much histrionic calls for banishment — even Atwood was called a ‘bad feminist’ for her advocacy for men accused of ‘sexual crimes’ to receive ‘due process’ — and there is so much attraction to ‘perverse seductions’, is that many ‘new wave feminists’ in the West fail to see that we are all labouring under a ‘siege mentality’.

When a people are under siege, they are trapped behind their literal or figurative walls. The outside world for the most part is beyond their ‘ken’ because very little gets through the gates and so the world leaves them behind.

Fear rules the day and night and the future.

The outcome of almost all sieges is that the people trapped inside the walls soon turn on each other. Paranoia rules supreme, conformity is demanded, and ‘cleansings’ take place until a disgruntled traitor finally leaves open the gates and the hordes descend.

IOW, if new wave feminism perceives a threat, real or imagined or hyperbolized, then those who dare to protest let alone question, or offer an alternative to the prevalent dogma, are branded as traitors or hypnotized victims of the enemy…I mean, patriarchy.

The seduction?

The Handmaid’s Tale is on one hand a cautionary tale while on the other a necessary catharsis.

Why?

Because the Bible is filled with tribal violence, with misogyny, with racism and genocide, and for instance, a commandment that a frightened superstitious people will ‘suffer not the witch to live : Exodus 22:18 King James Version (KJV).

Why even endure a ‘whisper’ of such non-humanist words to be uttered in any country which purports to be educated let alone civilized?

And yet In God we Trust is on much of the US currency.

So Atwood is warning us to be wary of those whose gaze falls not on the people but on the upward gaze to the ‘supreme’ dictates of an ‘Almighty’ — a God with often murderous human failings: He’s ego-centric, condemning, genocidal and racist: he favours his ‘chosen people’ over others.

And that’s important because there is after all an evangelical ‘Born Again’ Vice-President quietly and patiently standing in the wings awaiting his ‘God-Ordained’ time on the stage.

Because people who fall victim to a siege mentality often seek a saviour, Pence is one dangerous person.

It would be prudent to be cautious.

But what about the catharsis?

The news from the other side of the walls is not good.

Climate change, ‘migrant’ refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, Central Americans supposedly clamouring at the gates, religious fanatics calling for and getting blood in the Middle East, while populations in India and China burgeon in the billions.

Coral reefs are dying and glaciers melting while the Emperor Trump fiddles a tune which essentially means ‘trust me, all will be well with me on the golden throne.’

And a young woman, Greta Thunberg, whose second language is English, painted by many as a ‘chicken little’, articulately calls out the sheer hypocrisy of those in power who do nothing to help us ‘bring down the profit-minded walls’ that separate us to enable us to collectively do something about our planet.

That’s pretty heavy stuff.

So, of course it’s better to watch a TV show which shows the easily identifiable bad guys, and their traitorist female ‘enablers’ the Aunts, who push the heroes…

“To fight the unbeatable foe, To bear with unbearable sorrow
And to run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong…”

Many ‘new wave’ feminists therefore need the bad guys, all men, the toxic males, the perpetrators of the patriarchal ‘rape culture’, to be the vilified enemy which will easily provide definition and cohesion.

So to dare to question their orthodoxy with data which purports that women in the West are doing better is to risk censure.

They need men to be the ‘Windmill’ within the walls, to allow them, in true Quixotic style, whilst tilting in the wrong direction, to purge the sinners amongst them — mostly male — and ensure that only the chosen few — ‘the woke’ — will survive.

And the ‘woke’? Where do they fit in?

They need the ‘unawoke’, the white zombies for lack of a better word, to give them definition. The ‘woke’ are busy behind the walls too, dividing us from each other.

And that’s not to mean that there’s not a ton of social issues which need attention.

There are!

It means that you can’t on one hand excoriate one gender and their enablers, while on the other hand expect them, once cowed, to blithely follow you because you say so.

So it’s understandable why those fearfully trapped behind the walls, labouring under a siege mentality, instead of celebrating the positive gains made by many women, embraces the negative, and therefore needs a different catharsis.

The HandMaid’s Tale attempts, as does all good drama, to provide that.

Lamentably, new wave feminism and those of the ‘woke’ movement, by not engaging in dialogue or listening, fail to see how biblically ironic, how victimizing, how sexist and ultimately how divisive and infantilizing and counter-productive their movements have become.

Greta Thonberg wasn’t just calling out to ‘woke’ new wave feminist women for action, she was calling out to us all.

I’d like to think she was asking us to stop stop ‘manning’ our walls of self-importance, to stop labelling and therefore smugly diminishing the importance of ‘others’, erroneously thinking that once purged, some of us will be safe behind the ramparts.

We won’t be.

From Wiki:

Among the consequences of a siege mentality are black and white thinking, social conformity, and lack of trust, but also a preparedness for the worst and a strong sense of social cohesion.[3]