How fear, feminism, and fatherhood finally taught me to listen

The first time I read Margaret Atwood — sometime in the 80s, when hair was big and good men were reliably oblivious — I was scared. Not scared like Stephen King scared. Scared like existentially threatened.

Here was this woman, writing with such surgical precision about power, fear, and survival, that I felt like she’d cracked open the male psyche and left it bleeding on the page. And it hit uncomfortably close to home.

I grew up in a house where my mom drilled equality and women’s rights into us before we could even tie our shoes. She was fierce. She was loud. She was right. So you’d think I would’ve been ready for Atwood.

But I wasn’t.

Her stories weren’t about abstract “feminism” — they were about women living under the constant hum of male entitlement. About the kind of fear that men like me — even the “good ones” — didn’t have to feel. And that’s what scared me: realizing I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

At 20, I thought she was angry. At 50, I was horrified to realize she was honest.

At the time, I chalked it up to fiction — dark, brilliant, exaggerated fiction. But decades later, watching the rise of Trumpian America, I realized it wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint.

We’ve been watching rights get rolled back, women’s bodies legislated, and whole movements dismissed as “hysterical.” Suddenly, the dystopia Atwood imagined wasn’t a cautionary tale — it was a fucking documentary with worse lighting.

Atwood wasn’t warning us about a dystopian future. She was describing the present — we just didn’t have the balls to admit it.

Now, I don’t feel threatened by her words. I feel seen — and indicted, and called upon to do better.

I was supposed to be the good guy.  I was not.  I engaged in all the typical behaviour of a young man in the 80s – coercing women into bed when they were hesitant, exerting power when I felt threatened, and diminishing their self-worth. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, but it’s all embarrassingly true.

It’s easy to write all this off as just what men did and have always done.  It’s how we were raised.  Society did it – not me.

I was unaccountable for my own behaviour.

It took raising a daughter to really drive that home. Watching her navigate a world that still hasn’t learned the goddamn lesson — a world where – even after all the “progress” – she’s both subjugated and objectified by men who swear they “respect women” — that’s when it clicked.

I participated in this.  I took advantage.  But I will be accountable, and I will do better.

As a proud Canadian, I think of Margaret Atwood as a national treasure — not because she makes us comfortable, but because she refuses to. She shines a light on the insidious rot we’d rather paint over, and somehow still manages to do it with wit sharp enough to make you laugh while you bleed.

I used to read her and think, why is she so angry?
Now I read her and think, why aren’t we all?