Behind a pay wall, and not a right-on publication, but for what it’s worth.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...mplaints-torture-porn-violence-new-handmaids/
I don’t care for whatever political reasons one might find to object or defend it the series. Maybe attribute it to my ASD, but I simply found the conception ceremony contrived. It made Ofglen more than just a surrogate, her presence in the marital bed was as uncomfortable to watch as it was meant to portray, and dramatically, bravo. But the scene progressed the plot more than it progressed the setting, and I can see what Atwood was trying to achieve, if that’s how the scene plays out in the novels, I don’t know, it’s not on my reading list.
I stopped watching for acceptance with the world building, and the violence being a little gratuitous. I may have misread the bedroom scene, but I know of no marriage that would survive such a ceremony when alternatives exist.
That’s about as much as I have to say to say on the series, though I did find the resistance movement and the future geopolitical scenario intriguing.
WTF is this "Ofglen" being a surrogate? That's bullshit. For one thing, there are no scenes of Ofglen - who is not the main character - going through the ceremony. The closest to that is her posting as "Ofsteven" when the Wife tries to fake a cold to spare both her and the handmaid from having to go through the ceremony. That scene takes place on the back porch.
The main character's real name is June. Her Handmaid name is Offred. Her shopping partner's name is Ofglen. There have been two Ofglens; the first one was never a surrogate. She decided to have a child, and it was natural conception, not artificial. That Ofglen is lesbian, and her wife and son managed to escape to Canada.
The second Ofglen was a drug addict in her former life, and she was killed off in a recent episode (suicide bomber).
The "conception ceremony" is based on the story in Genesis (that's Old Testament stuff) where Rachel is whining to Jacob that she doesn't have any kids. So she tells her husband, Jacob, to impregnate her servant, Bilhah. Bilhah will be forced to give birth "upon my (Rachel's) knees" and therefore the baby will really be Rachel's.
Jacob, being a man of his time with two wives and two concubines, goes along with this. The Gilead elite decided to co-opt this bizarre notion of how forced surrogacy and childbirth are supposed to culminate in the Wife being considered the real mother of the Handmaid's baby. That's why there's a bible reading every month, before the Commander, his Wife, and the Handmaid go upstairs so he can rape the Handmaid and hopefully get her pregnant.
As for the article, they have free registration for one premium article/month, so I registered to read the rest of it.
It's BS, based on extremely incomplete knowledge, as are most of the comments.
Yes, Janine's eye was removed. The reason was for swearing. The surgery was not performed on-camera - unlike where Commander Putnam's hand was removed for adultery.
The horror of what happened to Janine isn't only her partial blinding; it's how it affected her mentally. She became very childlike, not entirely connected to reality, and is obviously suffering from a considerable degree of Stockholm Syndrome.
The last paragraph in the article talks about a woman being stoned. I didn't see that, but there's a movie called "The Stoning of Soraya M." which is pretty damned graphic and horrifying.
By contrast, the stoning scene in The Handmaid's Tale concludes with the other handmaids refusing to stone Janine (who kidnapped her own baby from the Putnam household and, after handing the baby to June, jumped off the bridge in a suicide attempt. She survived, and was sentenced to be stoned for the crime of endangering a baby. Janine's alternative punishment was to be sent to the Colonies to clean up radioactive waste and, at this point, is still alive.
For this act of disobedience, the other handmaids are forced to undergo a series of punishments. June is excused from part of that after the Aunts find out she's pregnant (the father is her Commander's driver, rather than the Commander himself).
My answer to anyone criticizing this show is to at least read the damn novel so they have some clue what they're actually criticizing. Most of the novel was depicted in the first season, but there are some parts that are showing up in Season 2.
I
Artificial insemination is illegal in Gilead. So is determining the embryo's sex. A lot of fundamentalist terrorists frown on modern technology. This is a country that forbids women to write.
I've not seen anything unrealistic in Gilead's depiction. Especially since I equate Gilead with ISIS
Exactly. But keep in mind that ISIS wasn't a thing in 1985. Atwood states that a lot of the repressive and fundamentalist religious stuff in the novel is based on the Puritans.
Do any other enclaves have flags?
Is it possible to fly a flag in Toronto and it be from some other location? People of Irish heritage in the United States, for example, proudly fly the Irish flag.
There are people who fly other countries' flags and it's allowed as long as it doesn't contravene any laws. There's been a push to outlaw Confederacy flags here, btw. We're not interested in being a refuge for southern American bigots to display their ideas and recruit new members for their "cause."
Since we don't have ethnic enclaves in my city, I have no first-hand knowledge of them. I assume that larger cities like Toronto and Vancouver, which do have large ethnic enclaves, probably fly flags and there were numerous complaints in Vancouver about the lack of English signs in Chinatown.
Can Little America be a legitimate new province? Granted, it sounds like an ethnic enclave like Chinatown or Little Italy, but I do not know any of these ethnic enclaves that have a flag
No. Realistically, HELL, no. The last time a new province was created was in 1949, when Newfoundland joined Canada. To this day there are still people there who want out again.
The last serious redraw of the map was in 1999, when part of the Northwest Territories split off and became Nunavut. That made sense for various reasons, and I don't recall any great controversy about it. Honestly, few people in southern Canada care much about what happens in the Territories, and if this makes that part of the country easier to govern (very hard for an MP or senator to represent a region that's so big that they need a plane to get around it because some areas only have seasonal roads or no roads at all), whatever works is fine.
But Toronto isn't remote, and I honestly cannot see a new province being created within a city. While Canadians are glad to help out our American neighbors (as we did on 9/11 when we took in many thousands of air travelers stranded when the U.S. closed its airspace), creating a whole new province just for American refugees is asking too much. And what happens when Gilead falls? It's not like it could be created and un-created just like that.
Why have this image be a combined Stars and Stripes with the Canadian Maple Leaf. Everyone has been grand at being critical of my suggestion but nobody has offered an alternative. I'm open to hearing alternate suggestions.
Why should there be an alternative? Why should there be such a reworked image in the first place? I get that it's intended to show that the two countries are friends (meaning the U.S. that's based in Alaska, not Gilead), and it's an expression of friendship between Canada and the refugees.
But it's just
weird. We take in refugees from many countries, and the flag isn't reworked for them.
