Margaret Attwood on doing the right thing, food, powergames and godesses

......."Perhaps surprisingly, Ms. Atwood finds reason to be optimistic about the future. “We haven’t dropped all of our atomic and hydrogen bombs,” she said dryly. An ardent supporter of environmental causes, she said she was also in steady contact with many people who are trying hard to make the world better. “What I tell people is pick one thing,” she said of all the causes out there.

The big question for human beings is the same for any bio-form: What are we going to eat?” Ms. Atwood said. “Who do we mean by ‘we’? We: you and me in this room? We in North America? It’s no longer true that one ‘we’ has no impact on another ‘we.’ ”

She is certain, though, that if women were in power, they would not oppress men the same way that men have oppressed women.

“It will never happen,” she said. “In strictly biological terms, females’ investment in their children is much larger, with a lot more of their physical self, their physical substance.

“There have been goddesses, powerful female figures, but to my knowledge there has never been a society in which there has been the wholesale oppression of men.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/books/22atwood.html?_r=2&ref=arts