It is fun watching the upvotes yoyo up and down. From the timing, it seems like my comment is generally agreed with in Europe and highly controversial in the US and Canada.

I didn’t know about the inspiration by Iran

While that is the primary inspiration that Atwood herself cites, I would say that the main trigger for her writing the novel was the rise of the evangelical right in America under Reagan.

It’s very hard to understand now just how dominated America was by the liberal, urban upper middle class from the forties to the late seventies. The Republican party was still just the party of rich people who didn’t want to pay tax, and the Democrats had increasingly dropped their traditional base in the South. Even when there was a nominally right-wing President, the balance of power rested with liberals. Eisenhower basically laughed at the members of his party who wanted to repeal Social Security and it was under Nixon that abortion was legalized; Nixon’s administration also created the EPA.

Basically, the reason Fox News keeps going on about the ‘liberal elite’ is because it strikes a chord for the Boomers, who grew up when America was a much more liberal country.

Then Reagan won the 1980 election and the liberal upper middle class lost. their. shit.

They couldn’t understand where these people had come from. Kind of like the shock when Trump won only even more so, because by 2016 everyone was used to the religious right but in the late 1970s it wasn’t seen as a serious force in politics. Previously evangelicals hadn’t voted as a block; Southerners had voted Democrat in line with their economic interests while conservatives elsewhere in the country had voted for the Republic ideals of self-reliance and American patriotism more than their religious stance. It was Reagan (or his campaign managers) who took advantage of the South’s swing away from the Democrats to pull the evangelicals and other religious groups into a powerful religion-based voting demographic.

A lot of liberals had blithely assumed that religion was a Medieval relic that wasn’t a real force in American society any more. So Reagan’s victory triggered a not inconsiderable amount of hysteria along the lines of: ‘we’re only one step away from a Christo-fascist theocracy’.

They weren’t, of course. Nor were they in 2000 when Bush won and we had to go through the whole song and dance again. But that didn’t stop Atwood jumping on the bandwagon.

I was very impressed by Margaret Atwood as a teenager but the older I get the more I see the myriad of holes in her work.

But even when I was a teenager, I still thought The Handmaid’s Tale is terrible. Both as a novel and as speculative fiction. It’s on a par with Ayn Rand’s brand of political commentary (still better written but then so is anime fanfiction). It’s basically the left wing equivalent of some conservative fantasy where the gays in San Francisco create a communist dictatorship where every Jesus-loving patriot is sent to the gulag.

I think what offends me most about it is her total ignorance about the country that inspired her to write The Handmaids Tale: Iran. The basic premise of her idea is that Iran was a prosperous, modern country where women didn’t wear headscarves and society was secular, until a small group of religious fanatics took power. In actuality, Iran in 1979 was still extremely conservative outside the major cities, not to mention extremely poor. Khomeini had broad popular support, and he was largely just enforcing the cultural standards of the majority of the population on the small westernized elite.

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Ideas against the freedom of women similar to those in the book can actually be seen in today’s society.

Really? There are people in today’s society who are advocating forcibly marrying young women to senior political figures? There are people in today’s society who are calling for polygamy, rape, and slavery? There are people in today’s society who are calling for the complete removal of all civil liberties and the enforcement of a theocracy that executes every dissenter?

This is what’s wrong with a lot of Margaret Atwood’s work: she keeps trying to pull the ‘oooh, we’re only a few steps away from this, you need to be scared… are you scared yet? Well you need to be more scared!’ schtick. Trouble is the moment you take a step back, you realize that what she’s actually done is taken a few trending headlines and accelerated them to the greatest hyperbole she can get away with. It’s like a haunted house where the monsters are just cardboard cut-outs of overused characters: Atwood waves it in your face as hard as she can, but it’s still just a limp-fanged Dracula you wouldn’t be scared of unless you’d already been primed to be on edge.