Marquette Gender and Sexuality Resource Center: Demonizing Men

From Facebook, notice of an event that will be starting about the time we post this:

Come and join the GSRC and Dr. Gerry Canavan in a group discussion of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” “Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.”

This, of course, is from the Marquette Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, the same people who brought the campus FemSex.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” is a feminist dystopia. More detail is provided by a synopsis of the movie based on the book:

In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife and mother becomes the childbearing pawn of a Christian theocracy. In the near future, as war rages across the fictional North American Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate (Natasha Richardson) sees her husband killed and her daughter kidnapped while trying to escape across the border. Kate herself is transformed into a handmaid -- a surrogate mother for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country’s fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the bizarre cult of the handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy and misogynist cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon finds herself ensconced at the home of the Commander (Robert Duvall) and his frosty wife, Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway). Forced to lie between Serena Joy’s legs and be penetrated impersonally each month by the Commander, Kate longs for her vanished earlier life; she soon learns that since many of the nation’s powerful men are as sterile as their wives, she may have to risk the punishment for fornication -- death by hanging -- in order to sleep with another man who can provide her with the pregnancy that has become her sole raison d’être.

This, of course, plays to all the prejudices of feminists -- the notion that “religious fundamentalists” (you know, those people who oppose abortion) want to oppress women, and further men want to reduce women to mere brood matrons excluded from all activities other than producing offspring.

Aside from the naked ideological bias, there is a huge irony here.

Just which males in American society oppress women? Those who want them to bear children? Those are the guys who want to marry a woman and create a family and be a father to the children.

But then we have the guys who just want sex. Perhaps they actively don’t want the woman to be pregnant, since that comes with all kinds of hassles (pressure to marry, child support, the need to leave the state). Or perhaps they just don’t care, knowing that they are not going to be responsible for the children they create anyway. Just have a good roll in the hay, and don’t worry about the consequences, which you can usually avoid.

Out in the real world (if not in the fever swamp of feminism) women are a bit more opposed to abortion being legal than men.

But feminists have blinders that won’t allow them to see this. Recognizing this reality would be to admit that women and men have a common interest in forming families. That’s not an effective way to demonize men.

Further, this kind of “knock her up and evade the consequences” mentality is especially common among black males. Over 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock. But blacks are a politically correct victim group, and admitting that black females are victimized by black males creates too much cognitive dissonance. Black males have to be victims too. Better that the oppressors are while males, especially Christian white males.

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” in other words, is hate speech. A similar book that demonized blacks, or illegal immigrants, or homosexuals would be instantly recognized as such. We think the First Amendment protects hate speech, but this doesn’t require that Marquette University promote it.

[Update]

Check out the comment from the leader of the discussion (which has been postponed) Gerry Canavan. He promises a more critical and nuanced view of the text than it typically receives.