Dystopianism

Perhaps you felt, like I did, that something you’d previously felt safe taking for granted—that a man credibly accused of sexual assault might not be elevated to a position of profound power over women—was no longer something to trust.
Sophie Gilbert "The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia"

When I first read this statement, it struck me as remarkably naïve, for lack of a better word. This simply isn't the way that politics works. It's never been the way that politics worked. As I read through Ms. Gilbert's article, the voice that it took on for me reminded me of some of my coworkers, back when I worked with children half a lifetime ago.

There was a fundamental question that all of us had to answer, and I think the easiest way to understand how each of us understood that question was to observe how we set about teaching the children we worked with avoid using violence. For some of the staff, the reason was one of empathy and building a better world. "You shouldn't hit people," the reasoning went, "because you don't like it when people hit you, and just as you feel bad when someone hit you, other people feel bad when you hit them." For others on staff, it was more a question of the harshness of the world outside of the treatment center. "You shouldn't hit people," the reasoning went, "because it's a bad habit to get into. And once you leave here, if you hit people or frighten them or make them angry, they'll hit you. And they'll want to hit very, very, hard."

That difference, between wanting to teach the children to live in the world we wanted them to live in, versus the world as we understood that it existed, was at the center of a lot of sometimes heated disputes between staff when it came to the philosophy of preparing the children for their inevitable ageing out of care.

And reading Ms. Gilbert's article, I felt that it was the very thing that I had once attempted to prevent. Having a child go out into the world with the idea that it was a better place than it genuinely was. Or could be. And there's a certain degree to which I view dystopian fiction, feminist or otherwise, as a reflection of that encountering the world as it actually is, rather than the rosy place that adult sheltering can make it out to be. But not understanding why it's that way.

Ms. Gilbert describes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as: "a speculative vision of a repressive theocratic state in America enabled by mass infertility and nuclear fallout."

But the thing that would turn the United States into Gilead isn't a drop in childbirths and atomic weaponry. It's the choices that people make. Ms. Gilbert notes, in talking about some of the dark futures (for women, anyway) that writers had called into being in Ms. Atwood's wake, that "The prospective end of humanity is calamitous enough to imagine drastic ends being justified." But what makes the works dystopian isn't the drastic means enacted. It's that they're only drastic for some people. The prospective end of humanity, rather than being a catalyst for shared sacrifice, becomes a rationale for the imposition of costs on one segment of society. But this is the way the world has always been. Because genuine sacrifice, by its very nature, is painful, and when they can, people shift that pain to others.

I understand that the novelists who write dystopian fiction likely have a good deal of genuine insight into the human condition. But the way that the public speaks of the genre often strikes me as driven by a desire for a world that never could have been.