Bad Women

In one of my previous posts titled 'It's Not Women vs Men' I had begun to illustrate how men were not always the persecutors of women. The aunts in A Handmaid's Tale are a great example of this. Instead of despising the sexist ethos of the system and yearning for women's rights, Aunt Lydia, one of the head aunts running the Red Centre supports them. Aunt Lydia delivers impassioned speeches to her 'girls', encouraging them to behave in a docile, subordinate manner not only to herself but to all men in society as well. To any woman reluctant to accept this she simply says, Ordinary, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary" (43, The Handmaid's Tale). To try and make her 'girls' comply, Aunt Lydia would brainwash her them by telling them how bad life was before and how much better it is now. Unfortunately if they still refused to comply, the Aunts would torture them into submission.

There are many plausible reasons as to why the Aunts chose to become Aunts. They may, as suspected by Moira been cravers of power. They may have even believed in the cause they were working for. But the most likely reason is that being Aunts ensured that they'd be able to retain some degree of freedom. It is also very surprising just how much power the aunts had, especially when this had seemed to be a completely patriarchal society.

The sobering fact is that this is not only true in The Handmaid's Tale but also in the world today. Women continue to subjugate other women, whether through being strongly antifeminist to actually forcing women to behave slavishly.

A book analysing sex trafficking that I am currently reading called Half The Sky: How to Change The World covers this topic extremely well. In it they mention how a large proportion of brothels who imprisoned trafficked girls and made them work as slaves were owned by women. Geeta Ghosh was just one of the girls in the book who had been trafficked by a woman. "A friend's 'aunt' offered to help Geeta and took her to Sonagachi, where the aunt turned out to be a brothel owner. ... 'The madam said, "If you ever try to run away, we'll chop you up and throw the pieces down this drain.'" (31-31, Half the Sky: How to Change The World).

This in particular shocked me. I had always thought, probably because of the stereotypes that I had been exposed to that people in the business of slave trafficking, particularly sex trafficking were all men. I was very wrong.

This just shows how sexist stereotypes still exist today. How many male mobsters can you name? Al Capone, Charles Luciano, Mayer Lansky and today's Salvatore Lo Piccolo. Now how many female ones can you name?

Sure they exist. There are hoards of them in fact. But because of our still sexist society, they have never become famous or idolised. The day that Grand Theft Auto comes out with a female protagonist gangster will be the day that I know sexism in the West is coming to a close.

Select women were allowed to be power figures in the patriarchal society of Giliad. But in the case of the Aunts this was only because they were seen as "the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves. ... no empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group." (320, The Handmaid's Tale). This is why females are used to suppress other women, not only in The Handmaid's Tale but also in modern day life, simply because they are the best at doing it. Otherwise the system would have simply collapsed.