Neoteros wrote:
No surprise Atwood saw that potential, given her immersion in left-wing Toronto politics of the 1980s. Canada is probably the country where the feminist anti-porn movement got further than in any other(eg. see the Supreme Court's Butler decision, which directly incoporated the MacKinnon/Dworkin analysis into its reasoning), and Toronto(still partly under the sway of Orange Hall puritanism) was the epicentre of that.
Not that that ultimately had much long-term impact. From what I've seen at the few remaining newsstands that carry magazine pornography, the raunchiest publications available stateside are freely available in Canada as well. But there's no doubt in my mind where Atwood got the image of earnest feminists tossing skin mags into the burning flames in the buildup to Gilead.
And this is how you end up with novels like The Handmaid's Tale, where the alliance between radical feminists and religious conservatives over porn became the genesis of a theocracy
No surprise Atwood saw that potential, given her immersion in left-wing Toronto politics of the 1980s. Canada is probably the country where the feminist anti-porn movement got further than in any other(eg. see the Supreme Court's Butler decision, which directly incoporated the MacKinnon/Dworkin analysis into its reasoning), and Toronto(still partly under the sway of Orange Hall puritanism) was the epicentre of that.
Not that that ultimately had much long-term impact. From what I've seen at the few remaining newsstands that carry magazine pornography, the raunchiest publications available stateside are freely available in Canada as well. But there's no doubt in my mind where Atwood got the image of earnest feminists tossing skin mags into the burning flames in the buildup to Gilead.