SPOILERS: all seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Well, I finally did it. I dove back into the world as I once knew it, which naturally included the occasional fear of the dystopian world created by Margaret Atwood in A Handmaid’s Tale. The book, which is somehow slightly more believable than the show of a similar name, if only because I read it right as I came of age. It had more credibility, as I’d read an interview I remember as Atwood stating that her inspiration for the tale was the Iranian revolution; I was raised a secular feminist, we knew Iranian expats, I really took it as an expression of how that could possibly look here in the West and not so seriously. Yet somewhere in my mind, as I had moved to the Midwest during the massive protest movement called the “Summer of Mercy”, this terror that men were “attempting to control our bodies” became the dominant expression of my feminism. The massive 1991 protests in Wichita, Kansas had been mounted by a (then) newer anti-abortion group, Operation Rescue, founded by activist Randall Terry.
The book and these more radical new protests, in which activists laid their bodies down to block clinics in Wichita, Kansas, became rather linked even if only as passing thoughts, here and there. The rise of what was being called the religious right, as well as the rather directly named Christian Coalition, were news staples of my formative early adult years.
They also seemed rather terrifying. While I had rounded out the decade with my first swing to the right, I spent the early 90s being spoon fed the narrative that the nascent but growing threat to our sovereign nation was an army of Christian men. Actually, I made several attempts to swing fully to the right, but never managed to surmount the issue of feminism save for a brief period. A common enough story, which I’m only remarking on here because the success of the Hulu adaptation of A Handmaid’s Tale would’ve been unthinkable without the preceding media blitz in my generation on this movement. And the preceding coverage of the Moral Majority in the Reagan Era, and the pro-family movement directly preceding that. The longstanding bogeyman on the left (which too many on the right fail to understand) has been the threatened emergence of a Christian, totalitarian state. This fear is so deeply embedded on the left it actually grows worse with every move that religious Americans on the center-right make, whether to counter the left or to simply take a stand. It’s a snake eating its tail, and as Christians cannot act differently in the face of evil it seems a rather ingenious bit of puppetry from the left. The best remedy is to break the spell entirely, let the scales fall from your eyes realizing there is no “Christofascist” agenda, merely the former majority of Christian Americans trying to retain a semblance of normalcy. Those conversion breakthroughs don’t happen every day, though.
So, I dove back in…if only slightly. Really, I wasn’t up for a rewatch of the world’s most depressingly unrealistic show, the performative misery of The Handmaid’s Tale, but I had to dive back into Hulu to rewatch Mrs. America’s even more ridiculous treatment of Phyllis Schlafly, which I’ll get to later. I promise. As for the Handmaid’s Tale (HT), oh the absurdity.
Firstly, once fleshed out for television the ridiculousness of this world becomes radically apparent. While we couldn’t see much through the eyes of book protagonist June/Offred (Offred= Of Fred, each “Handmaid” is given her master’s name prefixed by “of”), in the adaptation everything is pretty illuminated, and it looks pretty ridiculous. From a production standpoint it’s gorgeous, but…the premise is that the US has fallen to the insurgent “Republic of Gilead”, a supposedly Christian(ish) regime that originally existed to create a shaky parallel for Western readers for what other countries have experienced outside the West. Except this is supposedly America, and the other premise is that the birthrate has fallen so low that some major cities haven’t managed a live birth in 6 years….a rather massive fact that is neither seen nor felt in the flashback scenes at all, which just look like normal life circa 2016.
In fact, June’s family are remarkably unbothered about this impending extinction event, which is what that level of reproductive collapse would actually herald. Somehow, in the midst of this massive fertility collapse, June and husband Luke and their daughter Hannah are living a pretty hip middle class Boston existence. In fact, when the military wing of Gilead just shows up one day, cutting off women’s bank cards and banning them from employment, June is completely caught off guard. So is her lesbian best friend, who promptly spews forth a tirade against June’s husband and men generally. Half the show seems to exist to throw these banal reactions against what would be an absolutely terrifying reality, much like throwing the classic Lesley Gore tune “You Don’t Own Me” seems ridiculously cutesy in a world where someone literally does own Offred.
In further fleshing out Gilead, we’re treated to the backstory of Serena Joy Waterford, who is middle aged and crippled in the book, but here is a young and vibrant former conservative author and speaker. Until her movement’s planned Gilead comes fully into being, at which point that Christian conservative woman gets her comeuppance in the form of forced housewifery in a totalitarian regime in which women are no longer even allowed to read. A housewife with the bizarre institution that forms the other basis of this show; the birthrate collapse has fertile women placed into the homes of the ruling families of Gilead as “Handmaids”, forced via rape ceremonies to try and conceive children for these privileged couples.
Perhaps we just found this particular detail a bit titillating when we were young (there was a 1993 film adaptation, it’s not memorable but was news enough at the time), but it just seems even more bizarre on screen. Especially with the color coded clothing; red for handmaids, teal green for wives, brown for “aunts” (the domineering bosses who indoctrinate the handmaids), etc. While readers can imagine clothes that are merely color coded for the sake of regime enforcement, the garments on the show are flawless and bespoke. It all just seems laughably silly; of course there’s a Biblical reference to the handmaid doing the childbearing, and of course a formerly free middle class woman is forced into a red garment and enslaved in a wealthy couple’s home, forced once a month to be raped by the husband in the presence of the wife…..It used to irritate me when critics would claim this is just a feminist rape fantasy come to life, until I watched 4 episodes and proclaimed, holy crap, this sure seems like a weird feminist rape fantasy.
But there are a zillion practical issues here. How did the fertility crisis happen? “Chances of a healthy birth are one in five,” Offred says of a handmaid who actually manages to get pregnant, itself a rarity. Yet the flashbacks show a healthy world; did this crisis strike overnight? If so, then why does Aunt Lydia imply that it had gone on for decades during which birth control and abortion were promoted? 1 in 5 rare births produce a non-mutant child, but everyone threw their energy into a coup based on an agnostic leftist’s worst nightmare interpretation of Christianity? This world has top notch hospitals still, but no scientists bothered to look into this? No reason given? Offred/June’s pre-Gilead daughter is at least 7, but her birth is shown to be in a nearly empty maternity ward with an emptier nursery, the crisis already in full swing. A grieving young mother even tries to steal June’s baby, trying to add meat to this already decrepit plot only to leave more questions.
While obvious that this is entirely to shoehorn a plot hinging on the sexual reproductive slavery of women, the massive leap over any logical outcome to birthrate decline is so absurd it borders on hilarious. If we’re talking at least an 8 year drop in births (going by June’s flashbacks) wouldn’t the prestige in fertile women/couples have increased rather than led to the rise of the religious yet sterile Waterfords? Even had the coup happened, why the heck would the powerful, high ranking men of Gilead not just….marry the fertile women instead of forcing them into silly red robes and rape ceremonies? These women could’ve named their price. HT is so dead set on the feminist doctrine that we women are all seen merely as brood mares, walking wombs to be controlled, possessing no societal power of our own that it collapses under its own weight. And why are the rape ceremonies only once per month? No, I’m not advocating for more rape on this already horrifying show, but complete population collapse, no IVF and this is their plan?
Even had they wanted to stick to this worldview, wouldn’t it have been a bit more realistic (given the radical numbers the show quotes) to have set up exceedingly productive IVF centers? Perhaps a world where every woman with a womb is expected to help repopulate the earth, and the societal implications around that? I mean, the future of humanity is at stake here and advanced technology does exist, but nope. Brood mare post-Roe dystopian fantasy it is, with fertile women ear tagged and forced to spread their legs for the (mostly infertile) men of Gilead while laying between the legs of the increasingly furious wives. The conservative, Christian wives, always portrayed as trapped in cages of their own making, in turn making life a hell for any woman who didn’t opt into their “misery”.
Considering the rather radical numbers the show purports, in addition, and the fact that modern medical technology exists, wouldn’t it simply be more efficient to set up exceedingly productive IVF centers? Perhaps with women forced to be surrogates to pad out the brood mare sexist dystopia idea? I mean, if the future of humanity is truly at stake, surely that’s the way to go, but nope, we have fertile women assigned to high ranking (but mostly infertile) men of Gilead, forced to spread their legs for them while laying between the legs of the increasingly furious wives. Once a month. They’re trying to repopulate the world and they only attempt conception once a month.
The men, in turn, are shown as….well, at least the book’s Commander Waterford was a competent mastermind of the fall of a civilization. His show counterpart is the weaker half of a former power couple, incompetent and having to parade a weak semblance of masculinity through the cumbersome plotlines. Fleshing out June’s presumed dead husband Luke also present difficulties, rendering him a weak victim, even if only by circumstance, safe in Canada. But this also raises the question, never really answered, as to who the fanatical men are who managed to take over the entire USA and in so doing mounts an absurd attack on men generally. The show tries to present a monster-in-the-closet to feminists/liberals that there really is a cabal of patriarchal religious men who could rise to power but instead gives us a world in which basically the basement dwelling manosphere + its worst podcasters manage to enact a coup. There’s simply nothing Christian about Gilead, it’s more reminiscent of the worst corners of “repeal the 19th” twitter*. We’re to simply take their word that the majority of men, other than June’s husband and a few dissidents, are really quite comfortable with this new regime.
This is all liberal feminism 101, and it’s actually the only reason the show even works–for anyone. The other reason is the aforementioned hysteria regarding Christian authoritarianism that’s been probably brewing since the Goldwater campaign, but certainly for my generation since the 1990s. 2016 didn’t find a lot of liberal feminists at their best (I had returned to the dogma for a few years of bitterness myself before those scales fell), but this show’s release coinciding with the election of Donald Trump seemed to provide actual television programming to go along with the leftist narrative that had already been written, decades before. Believe or feel what you did about Trump in 2016, we were not sinking into this:
Nor had anything remotely similar occurred. Actually, the Democrats had run the feminist candidate who’d spent decades irritating most demographics in this country during a rising tide of political correctness that seemed poised to drown the nation. As it turned out, that didn’t sit well with at least half the country, but again, every decisive move made to regain ground lost to the left is met with a severe uptick in this particular narrative. I’m not saying it’s not a compelling story in its own way, the HT; dystopian tales generally are, even if the premise is ridiculous (Planet of the Apes, anyone?). Just that tossing it at us in 2016 illustrates my point on this brand of leftist hysteria, a narrative so strong we were accusing and grilling Brett Kavanaugh within a few years. The stubborn insistence by so many liberal feminists that protecting minorities really is their prime duty in life, which relies on this very premise; that “christofascist authoritarian regimes” are swooping in to cart them off as surely as the Nazis would’ve done….or the soldiers of Gilead.
Don’t get me wrong, the show is beautifully shot. The lighting near perfect. The acting is perhaps some of the best on television, and production values are top notch. But the inevitable shift to having June (and many of the others) escape to a free and completely normal Canada to sort out their trauma–of having been rape slaves in the weirdest regime in dystopian American fiction–makes Gilead look even more ridiculous. The matching bespoke costumes, the military control of the communities, the ideology alone, shown on screen in stark contrast to modern Toronto seems too discordant. From a Christian perspective, what religion even is this? If nothing else, it’s a mockery of Christianity.
In the end, what sort of works as a dystopian feminist horror story paralleling Iran is fine as a novella, but only that far. And upon looking a bit further, it seems Atwood had also believed the rising Christian nationalist narrative as well, then proceeded to give it its own anthem, costume and catchphrases. Where Atwood worked in a bit of satire and even jabs at the left, the show is completely serious in its woke social commentary. The book mentions college degrees being dime a dozen amongst women in pre-Gilead America from its post-Gilead epilogue, so common as to not be a solid indicator of education. It takes jabs at pre-Gilead feminists teaming up with right wing Christians against pornography and hastening the advent of theocracy. Book June’s commentary was less informed and shadowy, while show June is an omniscient Mary Sue, magically let off the hook of every punishment from eye gougings to amputations by one deus ex machina after another. The book depicts racial minorities shipped off to the colonies to shovel toxic waste until they die, the show has a black handmaid check June’s “white privilege”, remarking that “before” she was clearly a yoga lady with a Nordstrom’s card. Oh yes, she mentions the Nordstrom’s card.
And we are left with a ponderous exercise in what happens when far left politics, woke entertainment companies and the persistent nightmares of feminists end up with a sturdy budget. More than anything, I am just stunned that I ever bought into even a smidge of it. Any of it. That the framework of a liberal/agnostic upbringing so easily coalesced with the steady myth-crafting of the media, of the feminist fear mongering. Just as we’re learning that, though we GenXers don’t tend to take social media that seriously, distinguishing it readily from actual reality, the younger generations raised in it perhaps do not. For the generations raised on tales of terror about encroaching theocracy that only a Democratic vote could stave off, somehow a show this ridiculous actually can resonate. And that is the biggest warning and wake up call I could possibly give.