Of memes and metaphors

It's unpopular opinion o'clock.

Years ago, at university, I read The Handmaid's Tale. It was memorable, mostly because I actually finished it. I was not a gifted student. We’ll leave it at that.

It was memorable for other reasons too.

I suppose I was 19 or 20 when I turned its pages the first time - at the start of my journey as a feminist. The Handmaid's Tale seemed like an adventure story initially, a little fantastical. I still liked it, felt mesmerised by it. It took me longer, a few more turns around the sun, to understand it: to figure out this dog-eared book was asking more of me. Atwood wanted her reader to make a mental shift, from the comfort of black and white towards a disconcerting grey. She showed me that injustice can be stark, and it should stir the emotions; but its causes can be less straightforward. Those should stir the mind.

Perhaps that’s why I winced today, reading the news that a senior Minister had posted a meme, likening National party policy to The Handmaid's Tale.

Let’s go back a step. In the recent Budget, the Government announced that it’s removing prescription costs for everyone - usually five bucks a pop - with the change effective July. For what it’s worth, I think this is a pretty solid policy. There are a lot of points in the health system that create inequity, and this won’t fix them all, but for people who make it to the doctor but can’t afford meds, it’ll be great. And they’ll be less likely to end up in the emergency department, a particularly expensive form of care.

National initially said they'd repeal the policy if elected (a return to the situation we have right now, today). Then things got muddly. They seemed to modify their stance and say they’d go back to the status quo - but with ‘carve outs’, some kind of additional subsidy, for SuperGold Card holders and low-income folks with Community Services Cards. However, their proposed carve-outs won’t include all women who need contraception.

Is this an attack on the rights of women?

Well, yeah. The status quo policy setting certainly entrenches inequity for women, and for other groups too. Anyone who has a long-term need for meds, including contraception, pays more. That’s what happens when patriarchy gets capitalism up the duff and then refuses to pay child support. It’s bullshit. But the status quo has been tolerated more or less by both stripes of government forever - so if contraception costs for women are a sign that Aotearoa is Gilead, then both parties have been content to live Under His Eye for a while.

Take a further step back, memes and metaphors aside, and both parties' new policies are an improvement on the status quo for women. It’s a matter of degree. But that fairly moderate set of facts isn’t what we’re talking about. Some aren’t really talking at all, preferring to post memes of women peering out from under hoods.

Meanwhile, actual deliberate misogyny in politics is not in short supply. Whether the subject is abortion rights or same-sex couples, there are certain MPs who can’t open their mouths without the nineteenth century tumbling out.

I think it's great, it’s essential, to have a conversation about the way the health system - and other systems - entrenches inequity, including for women. But as we do, a doctor in Indiana is facing disciplinary action for giving an abortion to a ten-year-old girl who was raped, which looks a whole lot like the actual Handmaid's Tale to me. These things are both bad, but they're not morally equivalent - and as a feminist and a woman, I want a more nuanced conversation than this. I don’t care to be ominously warned off picking the wrong side in a cartoonish world of good guys and bad guys.

Here’s the kicker. Every aspect of Atwood's novel is based in fact. What seemed fantastical was real: each ugly detail of it. Not memes or metaphors, but women enslaved, treated as breeding animals, tortured, killed. There was no hyperbole, no irony, no clickbait. Atwood said of it, “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened… nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.”

I didn’t know at the time, but The Handmaid's Tale honed my ability to think critically, as a woman and feminist. Atwood encouraged me not to be taken in by only words, but to look to the ideas beneath. When I see her used in politicking - as a meme, a sloppy metaphor - it gets my back up. She taught me that.

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