"Even men used to say, I'd like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I'd like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I only had their words for it." (37)
Throughout the book, Atwood writes in subtle and not-so-subtle references to how sexual the world used to be before things changed and women had no rights to contrast from current society in the text. It would have been around the 1970s-80s when this took place, so not far from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The women who now have to wear head to toe coverings would have grown up in such a sexual environment that they wouldn't have known anything different, which would make living in such a sterile and hostile environment that much more difficult and painful.
Atwood?
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