The Handmaid’s Tale Won’t Solve Anything

New Yorker just published an interesting new analysis of the new/final season of Handmaid’s Tale. Among other things, the author notes that the show, like the uninspiring group of liberal feminists who’ve remained interested enough to stick around and try to rally today’s movement, “no longer knows what it believes in.”

The feminist movement does indeed seem limp and ineffectual today, some have noticed. Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood isn’t a big fan of #MeToo, observing that its main focus is on vengeance, not change. I’d say that’s true; like most progressive movements, it certainly doesn’t seem to be obsessed with strategizing and building coalitions in order to grow power so that it can change things. That’s a bit… odd; the movement has known that it needs to ally with other movements for a long time. It’s also quite obvious that women can’t girlboss their way out of their systemic oppression.

Seems to me that modern liberal feminism, like so many other movements today, is too focused on performative rage, not solidarity, which unfortunately does make sense. Why? Because the movement’s leaders — the ones hogging all the oxygen on social media spaces — are mostly privileged, well-off Democratic supporters who are more interested in racking up clicks by wasting their time yelling about the laughably pathetic behavior of MAGA idiots than about our capitalist system’s horrific mistreatment of women in the lower classes, where low-paid workers, especially single mothers, are in a hellish daily fight to survive.

After Roe was overturned, I was amazed that women didn’t instantly cohere on a massive, relentless campaign of civil disobedience, culture jamming, boycotting and such. It’s never too late, though, not at this rate. Y’all need to know your enemy and figure out where to hit them, because time definitely is up.

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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, is out. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in those books, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m spending a lot more time there now), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).