A woman, pregnant by rape, is denied an abortion, legally detained and subjected to a forced caesarean. A woman on low income wants to leave her controlling partner but can’t, because a government policy designed to “prevent family breakdown” means all their benefits are paid into his account. A woman reports a sexual assault, but the police don’t believe her, so they prosecute her for making a false allegation, while her attacker remains free to attack more victims. Girls are systematically groomed into prostitution, and police ignore their abusers. A man boasts on tape that he can “grab” women “by the pussy”: he is elected president. These are all things that happened in Ireland, the UK and the US over the last decade.

As the women of the Saturday Night Live cast sang in their musical response to men shocked by the revelations of #MeToo: “Welcome to hell, / This isn’t news. / Our situation’s been a nuisance since we got boobs.” From the theocratic abuse of girls in the Boko Haram-controlled regions of west Africa, to the torture porn-inspired murder of journalist Kim Wall by Peter Madsen, the world as it is offers such a rich variety of nightmares for women that it seems superfluous for fiction to devise ever more horrifying worlds that could be. But no matter: with a second season of the acclaimed TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale about to begin, the appetite for feminist dystopias shows no sign of abating, and publishers have proved more than willing to satisfy that demand.

In costume … supporters of Planned Parenthood hold a rally in Washington DC. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

In Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, abortion is outlawed in the US and a “pink wall” prevents women from flitting to Canada. In Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, global warming seems to have precipitated a reproductive crisis: pregnant women are held in detention centres, and fertile women conscripted to carry embryos. The Growing Season by Helen Sedgwick imagines a world in which artificial wombs have become the norm. The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch takes place above a poisoned Earth, in a craft likened to an “idiotic space-condom”, where a handful of wealthy survivors mutate to sexlessless. In Sophie Mackintosh’s bewitching The Water Cure, women have been stricken with a terrible sensitivity that makes men toxic to them. Jennie Melamed’s Arthur C Clarke-nominated Gather the Daughters is set in a nightmarish closed community where fathers are expected to rape their prepubescent girls as a substitute for reproductive sex – a population control measure.

Suffering sells, especially when it’s women who are doing the suffering

Suffering sells, especially when it’s women who are doing the suffering, and as with any trend, the pressure is for each new iteration to outdo what came before. The results sometimes skirt absurdity: in Vox by Christina Dalcher, due to be published in August, women are fitted with bracelets that deliver electric shocks should they speak more than their allotted 100 words a day. And there’s more to come. At the London Book Fair in March, the big announcements were driven by stories of dreadful things happening to women: Joanne Ramos’s The Farm, to be published by Bloomsbury next year, is set in an industrial surrogacy facility; Vardø, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, about 17th-century witch trials, was acquired by Picador for a six-figure sum after a 13‑way bidding war. In YA, the same fascination holds sway: Louise O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, published in 2014, established the tone, revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale for the teen market.

Atwood’s 1985 novel endures as a touchstone because its power to shock has never faded. Limiting herself to technology that existed and events that had already happened, Atwood created a vision of patriarchal totalitarianism that has radicalised generation after generation of women readers. Updated to the present day in its TV adaptation, it has acquired new resonance. Commissioned before Trump’s presidency, but broadcast during it, The Handmaid’s Tale has become an instantly recognisable reference point. Feminists have dressed in handmaid costumes to protest anti-abortion legislation; fashion designers have sent handmaid chic down their runways.

Pro-choice demonstrators at an abortion rights march in Washington DC, 2004. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock

Yet with season two already airing in the US and about to begin on Channel 4, some viewers have started to sound their discomfort about the levels of brutality in the drama. Season one, cleaving fairly closely to the novel, had a known arc of pain for Offred. Season two, loosed from its source material, has the potential for unlimited unpleasantness in Gilead. New York magazine called it “a ceaseless cavalcade of grisly feminist torture porn to rival our greatest misogynist auteurs”, and wondered whether this was justifiably shocking given the subject matter, or merely sadism.

The Handmaid’s Tale effectively inaugurated feminist dystopia as a genre, and as the feminist dystopia has flourished, its opposite – the feminist utopia – has faded away. Margaret Cavendish’s 17th‑century The Blazing World, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novella Herland, Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) all offered no-places where being female no longer meant being inferior. Revisiting these what-ifs is invigorating. In The Left Hand’s imagined world of Gethen, for example, there are no male and female humans: instead, every individual is capable of ovulation and insemination, and takes each role situationally. In such a world, writes Le Guin, there is “no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/protective, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive”. It’s an invention that points to both the cruelty of existing human sex classes, and the possibility of a life unconstrained by them.

One of the few novels to have revisited such imaginative scope in recent years is Naomi Alderman’s The Power. In Alderman’s novel, women evolve a specialised organ called the skein which allows them to deliver massive electric shocks, which in turn allows them to dominate men as men have historically dominated women. It’s gratifying to enter a world where women can patronise men with the breezy authority of the feared, and the novel’s reversals are deliciously revealing about our own society’s male default. It’s funny to read a lofty woman character tell a genuflecting male that his idea of a “world run by men” would be “surely a kinder, more caring and – dare I say it? – more sexy world than the one we live in”.

But when male protagonist Tunde describes what it is to be the inferior sex class, it’s shocking to hear such words from a man’s mouth. Only when you see a man being treated as women are treated, do you understand how very far we are from the radical notion that women are people. Yet The Power isn’t exactly a manifesto for change. In an extract from its future matriarchy’s religious text The Book of Eve, we’re told: “The shape of power is always the same.” When men have power, they use it over women; when women have power, they use it over men. The prospect of a society that isn’t defined by a sex-class system is a hazy impossibility here.

Visions of patriarchal totalitarianism … Margaret Atwood. Photograph: Canadian Press/REX/Shutterstock

Of course, that criticism suggests that a novel has some obligation to be a manifesto for change, which raises the prickly issue of what it means for a work of art to be feminist anyway. For Atwood (Alderman’s mentor during the writing of The Power), this has always been a point of contention, and her relationship with both the label “feminist” and the movement as a whole has long been diffident. In a 2017 op-ed for the New York Times, she answered the question of whether The Handmaid’s Tale is a feminist novel:

If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings – with all the variety of character and behavior that implies – and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are ‘feminist’.

It’s an answer that neatly shrugs off the deadening demand to make propaganda of her novel, but it’s also not really so much of an answer as a slipping between two straw feminisms. Feminism is neither the claim that women are perfect, nor is it anything that happens to be about women: it’s a movement to dismantle a system in which men systematically hold power over women and exploit them economically, sexually and (as The Handmaid’s Tale explores most obviously) reproductively.

Part of that movement has always been what’s called “consciousness raising”, in which women share their experiences and affirm the nature of the problem. The boom of feminist dystopias seems to fit exactly that description – they are identifying problems, sometimes with satirical exaggeration, and giving readers the relief of recognition. But consciousness raising is a first stage, only meaningful when it forms the basis for co‑ordinated action, and as political and cultural commentator Helen Lewis has pointed out, contemporary feminism has shown incredible strength in consciousness raising but much less conviction when it comes to concrete aims.

There are vital campaigns and notable successes (the Repeal the Eighth Amendment campaign to remove Ireland’s brutal restrictions on abortion, for example, and Caroline Criado-Perez’s work on female representation), but while high-profile movements such as the Everyday Sexism project and #MeToo have unambiguously established that we have a sexism and sexual harassment problem, they haven’t yet coalesced around a solution. The same predicament – an acute sense of what’s wrong, an impasse when it comes to ways of righting it – characterises much of the current literature of feminist dystopia.

That tendency manifests itself in a few ways. Sedgwick’s The Growing Season prods thoughtfully at whether artificial uteruses would provide the ultimate liberation from sex roles, or leave women even more vulnerable to male coercion. With reproduction outsourced from the female body, women are no longer stereotyped into “care” roles: a male receptionist is as unremarkable as a female executive. But male violence persists, and the external wombs offer a new target for it. “We have invented a whole new form of abuse. We have given men the ultimate power over women,” bemoans the feminist inventor of “pouch”. But these big ideas are sidestepped as the novel shifts into conspiracy-thriller mode and, in something of a cheat, establishes both internal and external gestation as equally valid choices. (It says something about how hollow “choice” alone is as a feminist aim that Sedgwick must conjure this unlikely equilibrium to make it convincing.)

Season two of The Handmaid’s Tale. Photograph: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Dalcher’s novel Vox lands some punches about the way female socialisation is simply the process of women becoming habituated to violent consequences – protagonist Jean observes her five-year-old daughter’s deft acquisition of feminine silence with horror – but arrives at a climax that’s as much an act of wish fulfilment as EL James’s Fifty Shades Freed. Jean not only defeats the patriarchy, but also runs away with a sexy Italian linguist. It’s a victory of sorts, but one that answers none of the questions that Dalcher raises about language, power and consent.

In Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, narrator Cedar’s desperate flight from the authorities who want to take her baby and control her body is only a small sidestep from the reality of reproductive coercion for Native American women, who have suffered forced sterilisation and the removal of their children (Erdrich, like Cedar, belongs to the Ojibwe tribe). There is no way to write a satisfying conclusion to this situation. Where The Handmaid’s Tale (the novel) avoided both dishonest rescue and grinding misery by abruptly cutting off Offred’s story, Future Home presses on into paralysing bleakness. The underground railroad of midwives that protected Cedar fails, and it ends with her captured and her baby taken: “I wait in my cell for my next pregnancy,” she writes to the child that she will never know. “Where will you be, my darling, the last time it snows on earth?”

Such ​finality can pose as hard-hitting, while actually luxuriating in female pain

Such finality can pose as hard-hitting, while actually luxuriating in female pain. Erdrich dodges that trap, but some feminist dystopias don’t. In O’Neill’s Only Ever Yours, girls are raised as “Eves”, scrupulously inculcated into femininity so they become pleasing wives for the ruling class of men. Those who fail are shunted down the caste system of women until, at the very bottom of the heap, they are sent “Underground” for termination. In one gruelling passage, main character Freida is punished for an infraction by being locked in her room, where the walls are screens which show on a loop her public shaming on national TV.

It’s a scene that captures the self-loathing of the adolescent girl magnified by social media, but a reflection is not the same as a critique. Reading this, with its precise focus on weight and appearance, seems more likely to reinforce a young woman’s anxieties than to offer her a decisive debunking of the beauty myth. The conclusion has Freida embracing her end in the Underground with an almost erotic passion: “The needle sinks into my skin, the liquid whispering, forget, forget, to my blood … I am ready to feel nothing, forever.” Contra Atwood, feminism is not about idealising women, and nor is it about simply representing them, but both those options seem vastly preferable to a kind of “feminism” that offers consolation in self-destruction.

If the truly feminist dystopia must honestly portray women’s struggles without sensationalising their pain, and dramatise a political analysis without falling into leaden sloganeering, then maybe such a thing can never exist. After all, one of the reasons for Atwood to be wary of the “feminist” label is that it’s so often an extra standard applied only to women writers – a standard they will fail, since the purpose of most standards applied only to women is to ensure that women will never be good enough.

But there is fiction that understands women’s oppression, recognises women’s subjectivity, has the imagination to stress-test how the worst case might play out, and the hope that we might pick some kind of better future from it in the end. A feminist dystopia, in other words, must have a little of the feminist utopia to it. In Red Clocks, the horror of the “Pink Wall” (a scenario that is more or less fact for women in Ireland without passports, or women in conservative American regions who lack the resources to transport themselves across state lines) twines with a moving vision of female resistance, as Zumas’ characters learn to look to each other for aid. There is a bond that stretches not just between women but back through time: “Thousands of years in the making, fine tuned by women in the dark creases of history, helping each other,” thinks one. Sisterhood is also salvaged in The Water Cure, albeit somewhat disturbingly. By the end, its women characters have killed a man to protect their closed world: they leave him on the beach as a message to other interlopers that “this is no place”, and their ambiguous utopia has been preserved. The Book of Joan, with its strange and looping sense of time (the narrator, Christine, and her adversary, Jean de Men, are revisitings of the medieval proto-feminist Christine de Pizan and the hyper-misogynist author of The Romance of the Rose), can’t exactly be said to offer progressivism: how can you progress when history is collapsing on itself? But there is something hopeful in the claim it stakes for a return to acknowledging materiality in politics, and not living on the unsustainable expropriation of either planet or body: “The body is a real place,” says girl-rebel Joan as she marshals the land-bound survivors into an army. “A territory as vast as Earth.”

Then there is Octavia Butler’s superb Parable of the Sower (1993). On an overheated and resource-poor near-future Earth where women are one more resource to be exploited, protagonist Lauren leads a straggling band of pilgrims through a violent wilderness with a dream of starting something new. That something is Earthseed: part religion, part interstellar colonisation project, “the ultimate human change short of death … a destiny we’d better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs”. While the world we live in is still no place for women, feminism needs such dreams of better things. Enumerating our wounds, by itself, will not carry us to a place beyond harm.