Awoman, pregnant by rape, is denied an abortion, legally detained and subjected to a forced caesarean. A woman on low income wants to leave her controlling partner but can’t, because a government policy designed to “prevent family breakdown” means all their benefits are paid into his account. A woman reports a sexual assault, but the police don’t believe her, so they prosecute her for making a false allegation, while her attacker remains free to attack more victims. Girls are systematically groomed into prostitution, and police ignore their abusers. A man boasts on tape that he can “grab” women “by the pussy”: he is elected president. These are all things that happened in Ireland, the UK and the US over the last decade.
As the women of the Saturday Night Live cast sang in their musical response to men shocked by the revelations of #MeToo: “Welcome to hell, / This isn’t news. / Our situation’s been a nuisance since we got boobs.” From the theocratic abuse of girls in the Boko Haram-controlled regions of west Africa, to the torture porn-inspired murder of journalist Kim Wall by Peter Madsen, the world as it is offers such a rich variety of nightmares for women that it seems superfluous for fiction to devise ever more horrifying worlds that could be. But no matter: with a second season of the acclaimed TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Taleabout to begin, the appetite for feminist dystopias shows no sign of abating, and publishers have proved more than willing to satisfy that demand.
In Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, abortion is outlawed in the US and a “pink wall” prevents women from flitting to Canada. In Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, global warming seems to have precipitated a reproductive crisis: pregnant women are held in detention centres, and fertile women conscripted to carry embryos. The Growing Season by Helen Sedgwick imagines a world in which artificial wombs have become the norm. The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch takes place above a poisoned Earth, in a craft likened to an “idiotic space-condom”, where a handful of wealthy survivors mutate to sexlessless. In Sophie Mackintosh’s bewitching The Water Cure, women have been stricken with a terrible sensitivity that makes men toxic to them. Jennie Melamed’s Arthur C Clarke-nominated Gather the Daughters is set in a nightmarish closed community where fathers are expected to rape their prepubescent girls as a substitute for reproductive sex – a population control measure.
Suffering sells, especially when it’s women who are doing the suffering, and as with any trend, the pressure is for each new iteration to outdo what came before. The results sometimes skirt absurdity: in Vox by Christina Dalcher, due to be published in August, women are fitted with bracelets that deliver electric shocks should they speak more than their allotted 100 words a day. And there’s more to come. At the London Book Fair in March, the big announcements were driven by stories of dreadful things happening to women: Joanne Ramos’s The Farm, to be published by Bloomsbury next year, is set in an industrial surrogacy facility; Vardø, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, about 17th-century witch trials, was acquired by Picador for a six-figure sum after a 13‑way bidding war. In YA, the same fascination holds sway: Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, published in 2014, established the tone, revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale for the teen market.
Atwood’s 1985 novel endures as a touchstone because its power to shock has never faded. Limiting herself to technology that existed and events that had already happened, Atwood created a vision of patriarchal totalitarianism that has radicalised generation after generation of women readers. Updated to the present day in its TV adaptation, it has acquired new resonance. Commissioned before Trump’s presidency, but broadcast during it, The Handmaid’s Tale has become an instantly recognisable reference point. Feminists have dressed in handmaid costumes to protest anti-abortion legislation; fashion designers have sent handmaid chic down their runways.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
