jpallan

The thing that killed me in the afterword was the scholars studying Offred's story complaining that a true telling of a woman's suffering was not even a fraction of the worth of a section of records from her Commander's personal computer — why didn't she ensure they got that, instead? Didn't she realize that some financial printouts and some e-mails were far more valuable than her life, husband, child, and suffering?

Last time I checked, ad space in the bathroom of a truck stop was scrawling a number on the wall above the urinals. You have to pay for that now?

It's both, actually. Once a male protector lays his claim, it's usually a deterrent to other male predators seeking underage girls. Of course, getting raped by that male protector is a routine part of it.

Forced marriage happens a good deal in the U.S. among groups like the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints. It sucks by any standard, but the key thing is to ensure that girls have rights to comprehensive health care and education, and that boys have the same rights.

In groups with plural marriage and forced marriage, a lot of adolescent males will be expelled from their society for random reasons, largely to allow older men to have access to adolescent females.

On a more optimistic note, although that's limited here, when I did refugee work in the United States, for people coming from far away, most families sent sons because sons were the ones who had gotten an education and become literate in the first place, and their chances of getting a profession and skills were much higher, in the family's opinion.

Even if a son got deported later on, with whatever training and education he could get here, and hopefully a working knowledge of English, his chances were going to be better at home.

(It didn't usually work out that way — refugees, including economic refugees, are often enormously traumatized and unable to learn and retain information in their new environments, and even the ones who are are going to face enormous cultural shock. But I did understand the reasoning.)

It's not right, this male preference, and as a feminist, I'm angry, but as the mother of two teenaged daughters, I also understand that girls are also generally socialized to be at home and there are huge concerns about sexual violence.

In many countries where the marriage age is younger and contraceptive access is patchy, it's assumed that once your daughter turns 20 or so, she will belong to another family entirely and will not be able to help support you, she'll be too busy with her obligations as a wife, daughter-in-law, and mother. So the need to economically invest in your daughter can be seen as less urgent. That doesn't mean that they lack emotional investment or don't love their daughters. They just have a different perspective on desperate economic decisions.

"What are you going to charge him with, possession of a condiment? My client bought an eighth of oregano. He's a moron, that's not against the law."