You know that old joke; that if someone is particularly homophobic it must be because they are trying to hide that they are, in fact, themselves gay. I wonder if the same sentiment can be applied to National Post columnist Barbara Kay, because the hatred she displays for women must be a cover for something.
Take for example her February 23rd column: “Teach Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale as the story it is, a nasty trifecta of feminist bigotry”
I think the worst part of this article is that is actually makes want to defend the writing of Margaret Atwood. I do not like the writing of Margaret Atwood.
The start off point for the article was the fact that one parent did not want their child reading “The Handmaid’s Tale” for school because the story amounted to “fictional drivel”. Which is funny because that’s how I would sum up the rest of Kay’s article. Or perhaps more accurately, “The Drivel of One Who Doesn’t Understand Fiction”.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” is a dystopian novel presenting a world in which women are forced back into a world of oppression where they a kept as slaves or concubines in which to produce children.
The first attack Kay makes on the novel is it is so horribly wrong because Atwood uses an example of patriarchal Christians as the rulers and controllers of this science or speculative fiction novel. Which of course just wouldn’t happen because Christians would never do anything like trying to control people.
“Conservative Christians are the last people on earth to impose government-run programs of any kind to govern private sexuality.”
Hey Kay, have you tried looking south of the border lately. Come on, just take a look. Even with a pro-choice democratic president they are still many “Christian Conservatives” that are desperately trying to overturn Roe v. Wade. It is the “Christian Conservatives” who are pressing for abstinence-only education in the publicly funded schools. It is the “Christian Conservatives” who are pushing forward laws to protect pharmacists who won’t do their jobs and dispense prescription medication such as birth control and plan B. It is “Conservative Christians” who are arguing against equal rights for same-sex couples. All of these aspects are government-run or controlled by the government and all of them affect private sexuality.
Later on we also get to see a quote by Ms. Kay herself railing against “abortions” and “fertility technology”. So she doesn’t want to “govern” but damnit she will tell you what you should and should not be able to do while procreating.
Of course it gets worse.
“The Nazi Lebensborn program, in which fertile young women were lodged at breeding farms, there to be serviced by SS officers, which seems to have been Ms Atwood’s inspiration, came from the pagan, anti-religious right.”
Can we please, please, please get over this whole idea that the Nazi regime was anti-religious. You can’t be anti-religious and pagan at the same time, it doesn’t work. Paganism is a religion. Secondly the Nazi regime had very close ties with the Catholic Church thank you very much. (Quite honestly I could go on but it will have to be a different post otherwise I will be seriously off-topic.)
There were no breeding farms. The Lebensborn homes were simply places where the wives of SS officers and chosen unwed mothers could choose to deliver their babies.
“The Nazis’ goal with the Lebensborn project was conceived as a means to improve Germany’s Aryan racial stock and to repopulate the war-ravaged nation. On its face, the project seems like something of a harbinger of Ms Atwood’s vision.
But with one crucial difference that makes a mockery of Ms Atwood’s alarmist projection. German women were never forced to breed. In the Lebensborn project, the “handmaids” were volunteers. Indeed, very willing volunteers, seduced by the perks of higher social status, nutritious food and high quality medical care, luxuries ordinary Germans could only dream of at the time.”
Oh how simple things are! “Very willing” and “seduced by perks” are quite the oxymoron and if food and medical care are the big perks you have to wonder what type of conditions these women are coming from. Oh wait, that’s right, the truth is that many of the “willing volunteers” were actually single women who were afraid of being socially ostracized due to having a baby out of wedlock. They were possibly without any access to medical care and maybe starving as many supplies dwindled towards the end of the war. So if you were blonde with light eyes and so was the father of your “illegitimate” child you were given good medical care so your child could be taken away from you and given to a proper German family. Yup, sounds like the situation every women would love to find themselves in.
And then Kay loses her mind.
“On the other hand, German men were forced to fight, millions of them to die ghastly deaths. If you want to know what history’s real forced sacrifice looks like – forced genderized sacrifice, that is – think of the millions of young healthy males in
World Wars One and Two who were maimed, shell-shocked and blown to bits to satisfy or subdue the bloodlust of tyrants and ethnic nationalists. Given the choice, having sex with fit, virile men, living in luxury for nine months and earning the plaudits of your nation would seem an enticing alternate reality. A choice men didn’t have.”
I love the whole “plaudits of your nation” bit. I mean these women were so lauded that they remained anonymous because… that’s what beloved heroes do? And because this idea was so popular there was an immense amount of backlash when Himmler encouraged SS and police to father as many children as possible… And fantastic pillars of the German community that they were, the unwed mothers at the Lebensborn homes when there were disbanded were actually attacked and run out of the community. And the children, oh those darling children, future of Germany have faced years of being ostracized, with no families, growing up in orphanages. Just so “enticing” isn’t it?
The German people did not approve of this so-called “breeding program”. They thought that the homes simply encouraged immorality among young single women.
It’s funny that Kay seems to have received the message that Lebensborn was not about forced breeding but seems to think it was a hunky soldier matchmaking service. Which, although showing an interesting perspective on Kay’s own personal thoughts, it wasn’t. It was all about discouraging abortions among the “racially pure”.
The “won’t somebody think of the poor men” think is cute too because obviously these women, while living in the lap of luxury, are sending these poor creatures off to their doom. Oh wait, it wasn’t the women? It was actually men sending other men to the front lines? Go figure. And the only reason this sacrifice is so “genderized” is due to the sexist opinions that the only thing women can do is look pretty, make sandwiches, and give birth to the future generations.
Sorry, but this little bit of male sexism is only due to the underlying sexism against women. Stop the whole ‘women are weak breeding machines’ mentality and you’ll have the two sexes dyin’ in equal numbers. Yay.
“…all decent men will instinctively fight to protect women and children…”
Having to label that whole category with “decent” is pretty sad. Because otherwise we might have to admit that the vast majority of violence against women assault, sexual assault and murder are committed by men. Not to mention that men are also the majority of child predators. And then, then we might have to admit that instinct really doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.
“Here we are 23 years later. Where are the forced-breeding camps? Women rule; abortion is rampant; fertility technology has run amok; and men – insofar as their traditional roles as providers, progenitors and protectors are concerned – are an endangered species. Some cautionary tale. The Handmaid’s Tale is rather a tale told by a feminist, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
This how Kay ends her article and the part that really made me think, “Hey lady! You do realize this is fiction right?”
I mean obviously a book has absolutely no literary merit because if it’s fictional ideas don’t come true. I mean books like George Orwell’s “1984″, no on every talks about it, no one ever bothers to read it, especially in an educational setting! I mean Big Brother, the Ministry of Truth… pssht. Obviously useless drivel that no one pays attention to anymore because hey, it was written in 1948, obviously predicted this kind of world in 1984 and here it is 2009 and the world isn’t like that. Ditto on “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley and “Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury. Dystopian novels are obviously useless and have nothing to add to the literary discourse because they don’t accurately reflect our world. In fact we should also do away with all of these Science Fiction novels and Fantasy novels cause it’s not like anything in them is plausible.
I hope everyone realized that the last paragraph was extremely sarcastic.
Should I even go into the laughable assertion that women “rule? And what does fertility technology have to do with women being in control? And the sexist assumptions about the roles of males… Let’s just sum it up this way… Ms. Kay, you’ve missed the point, in a prejudiced and poorly researched way.
Sources:
Creating the “Master Race” Himmler’s Children
TIMEBASE 1939
PS: Amusingly while getting this little post together I came across newest Kay article, in which she starts off using a part of George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm” to discuss the topic of brainwashing. So, let’s get this straight. Dystopian novel about women being lowered to second class citizens is “drivel”, while animals replicating a totalitarian government while running their own farm is totally educational and completely applicable to everyday life. Riiiight.
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