This feels like a particularly strange moment in history, but it’s one that writers seem to have anticipated: The past two years have seen a spate of works delving into the discombobulation of the present. During the early days of the Trump administration, readers sought out dystopian stories that connected the turbulence and the racism and the alternative facts of the 45th presidency with anxieties the world has had before. Over the last couple of years, though, fiction’s dystopias have changed. They’re largely written by, and concerned with, women. They imagine worlds ravaged by climate change, worlds in which humanity’s progress unravels. Most significantly, they consider reproduction, and what happens when societies try to legislate it. [...]
The novel that’s received the most attention over the past two years from women readers troubled by the news was actually published 33 years ago, smack in the middle of the Reagan administration. In 1985, as America lurched socially to the right in what was seen as a rebuke of the sexual revolution, Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale, a speculative vision of a repressive theocratic state in America enabled by mass infertility and nuclear fallout. [...]
There were moments when life seemed to be doing its utmost to imitate Atwood. When Oklahoma lawmakers tried to pass a bill requiring women to get written permission from their sexual partner before having abortions. When the Trump administration sanctioned children and babies being literally ripped from their parents’ arms, and when the White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the policy of family separation was actually “very biblical” because it was enforcing existing laws. [...]
There’s no mass epidemic of infertility in Red Clocks, no impending threat to the existence of humankind. Male politicians simply take away women’s rights because they don’t think women should have them. They’re incapable of summoning the empathy to imagine what an unwanted pregnancy might feel like, incapable of imagining that women’s desires regarding their own bodies should take precedence over men’s opinions. Red Clocks is plausible because men’s opinions on abortion and assault and female bodily autonomy have always counted more than women’s. You don’t need to see elderly white senators on television, lining up to apologize to a man who’s been accused of sexual assault, to grasp how much.
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