Margaret Atwood is 83 years old and Canadian and she’s well into her “living legend” era. Which is why it sort of cracks me up when people ask Atwood about superficial things or royalty. It’s even funnier that she actually does have opinions on all of that stuff. Back in 2015, she even talked about how she was bored and disappointed in Kate Middleton’s “uneventful” princess style. Atwood is currently promoting a new collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood. The Times of London interviewed her about American politics, royalty, Russians and religion. Some highlights:
On the state of American politics: “We are already into not-quite-book-burnings and we are already into the ‘let’s control women’s bodies’,” she says, pointing to the US Supreme Court’s reversal of abortion rights. She finds it “incredible” that the works of Toni Morrison, the Nobel prizewinning novelist, are now being banned from some American classrooms. History has a habit of repeating itself, she says. It is the “wheel of fortune”, the tarot card representing life’s eternal cycle; somebody at the top crushes others, only to be crushed by those rising up.
On Prince Harry: An admirer of Game of Thrones, Atwood thinks Prince Harry, the self-described “spare”, is lucky to be born into a royal family that has been stripped of real power. Otherwise “he probably would have been murdered by somebody lower down the food chain to get him out of the way”.
On religion: She claims to have “no opinion” on the afterlife. “I am a strict agnostic. But atheism is a dogma like all the others,” she says.
On trans rights: Atwood is wary of the debate over trans rights, but she has firm views on the flexibility of gender. “There is a bell curve. This is why you need to know biology,” she says. Stuck in the desert, the writers of Genesis had no idea about the hermaphrodite sex lives of “snails and bivalves”, she points out. The trans issue has bitterly divided the feminist movement. “Has nobody considered the fact that there are agents provocateurs in the mix? People are pretending [and] saying outrageous things to get real trans people in trouble. If this isn’t happening, it’s the first time in history.”
On Me Too, due process & justice: On the upside, #MeToo “made a lot of guys think twice about keeping it zipped, especially if they were prominent”. But, she adds: “If you make pointing an infallible weapon, some people are going to abuse that.” This month she is launching #AfterMeToo with the Canadian Women’s Foundation, on how to report and investigate sexual harassment and assault fairly. “You cannot confuse beliefs with facts, especially if you are accusing somebody of a serious crime,” Atwood says.
[From The Times]
“Has nobody considered the fact that there are agents provocateurs in the mix? People are pretending [and] saying outrageous things to get real trans people in trouble” – yes, that’s happening, for sure, and even worse, people are now trying to outdo each other with increasingly bigoted hysteria. As for her comment about Prince Harry and the Windsors… like, does she realize that Prince William absolutely wanted to send his brother and sister-in-law into exile? While the Windsors might not have the “power” they once had, their medieval desires are still there and the Sussexes have absolutely faced mortal danger and, in Harry’s case, actual violence.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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