In her recent interview with El País, Margaret Atwood once again describes the fate of older women with all the subtlety of a jackhammer: “Older women are only allowed to be two things: wise grandmothers or evil old witches.” One imagines readers —the majority of them women, according to every single cultural survey— gathering each morning to vote on which category today’s interviewed author belongs to. The surprising part is that this line is presented as a kind of visionary revelation, when the real mystery is why we continue treating this oversimplification as profound commentary. But of course: without archetypes, there are no myths; and without myths, there is no heroine. The whole scaffolding collapses.
Because Atwood prophesies. She is the Official Oracle of the Coming Dystopia. In the interview she repeats —as she did in 2016, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2024, and now 2025— that The Handmaid’s Tale was not a metaphor but a direct warning. She once again invokes abortion debates in the United States, control over women’s bodies, and the eternal rise of “the far-right.” According to her, the wolf is already in the living room, sipping tea. It matters little that not all political or cultural contexts support such a uniform reading. Dystopia works best when served without nuance, like instant coffee: just add indignation.
What is curious, of course, is the stage from which this patriarchal siege is denounced: literary festivals where 80% of the programming is female; round tables where the issue is not whether women are present, but how to manage the overflow; publishing houses run by women for decades; bookstores whose buying public is overwhelmingly female; marketing departments almost entirely staffed by graduates in literature, humanities, and communications —again, overwhelmingly women. But in the interview, all of this dissolves into the solemn haze of the siege narrative: patriarchy remains, looming, protean, indestructible, invisibly omnipotent and, naturally, responsible for everything.
There is something almost touching in the effort to keep the monster alive. Because if the wolf ceases to be believable, the entire symbolic structure collapses. Without the wolf, there is no resistant heroine; without the resistant heroine, there is no ongoing narrative saga; and without the saga, it becomes quite difficult to maintain one’s position as the moral voice of the age —a role cultural industries are very eager to perpetually reward. The interview serves as a reminder that, in this game, dystopia is a business model, not a diagnosis.
Atwood also remarks that feminine imagery is still trapped in patriarchal projections: “We’re still being put into stories. We’re archetypes.” One is tempted to point out that repeating these archetypes as an inescapable destiny —even when daily reality contradicts them— may be the very thing reinforcing the cage. It is like complaining about the rain while sitting in a spa in the desert.
This is not to say the problems she mentions do not exist. They do. What is being challenged is the eternal alarm tone, the refusal to acknowledge that in many cultural spaces, the wolf hasn’t had a key to the building in a long time. But admitting that would require moving from dramatic prophecy to practical responsibility —which is, of course, much less quotable.
So yes, if the wolf does show up one day, someone do let us know. Not out of fear, but so we have time to draft the press release.
