Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them.” With good reason. The man who killed 10 people and injured 13 others in Toronto by running them down in a van seems to have belonged to Incel (for involuntarily celebate). An underground internet group, they blame women – who they perceive as holding the power – for depriving them of sex, which they see as a fundamental right.
But they hate everybody who has sex.
They accept that they are undesirable or as they prefer, untouchable. The lowest caste. But, according to Zoe Williams writing in The Guardian, “Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice.”
Zero concept of woman as people, but something to be distributed – shared around ‘fairly’ among all men – allocated by the state.
No wonder I cannot bring myself to reread Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale nor watch the fabulous Elisabeth Moss in the lead role of the TV series. It’s too close to reality for many women in the world and not a distant enough possibility for the rest of us.
The Persistent Woman 