‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Won’t Come True
Stop fretting and keep fighting
Hulu has adapted Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale and the think pieces and hot takes are flying. It’s a great show, filled with terrifying imagery and horrifying ideas. I’ve never seen a pilot that’s made me more uncomfortable.
That terror spread like an infection through the internet punditry. Cultural critics clicked their keyboards and worried how close America might be to a future resembling The Handmaid’s Tale. Hulu, knowing a good thing when it saw it, regularly reminded audiences that its new show was important and prescient.
Again … I love the show. It’s horrifying and entertaining and — yes — important, but saying that it’s prescient is akin to praising a horror movie because it warns of a real life terror. Imagine a world where parents kept their teenagers awake in the months after The Nightmare On Elm Street’s release. Imagine the mass burning of VHS tapes on the heels of The Ring.
We’d think the participants mad. This idea that an oppressive theocracy is possible in America is bullshit. If anything like Atwood’s dystopia happened in real life, resistance cells full of pissed off women would be executing men in the street in under a month.
In case you missed it, The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Gilead — a theocracy born of the ashes of the American experiment. It’s set in a future beset by ecological disaster where a hardcore protestant sect blew up Congress, blamed it on terrorists, seized power and reorganized society.
In this brave new world, fertility rates are in the toilet the theocracy rounds up the few fertile women and trains them as handmaids. These red-robed women serve as surrogate wombs for Gilead’s leadership. The story follows Offred — Of Fred — a woman who remembers what life used to be like before all this religious nonsense.
It’s a horrifying and effective show. The scenes are gorgeous, the acting perfect and the script incredible. But it’s a horror fiction and its power comes not from its prescience but just how divorced from a possible reality it actually is. No one explained this better than Megan McArdle over at Bloomberg in her article “No, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Is Not ‘Unexpectedly Timely.’”
“The culture is moving the other way,” McArdle wrote. “Women are gaining more economic power relative to men; the nation is becoming less religious. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is becoming less plausible a future with each passing year, no matter how hard feminists insist that there is only a brief and slippery slope between overturning Roe v. Wade and forcing women into state-sanctioned breeding programs.”
And worse, McArdle thinks that obsessing over a possible future that won’t happen leaves us vulnerable to the ones that actually might. “There is nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page.” She said. “But there is something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality. That risks confusion so we will not notice the real dystopia rising — or the rest of the world will be too tired of our cries to hear any warnings we shout.”
Look, I hear you. I’m from Texas and I live in the Deep South still. The asshole local GOP legislature across the country have come after women’s reproductive rights in a big way. We’ve written about here at Defiant repeatedly. But these things are less the revenge of an ascendant right wing and more the dying gasps of a dinosaur. We should absolutely be vigilant and fight, but we must realize that this reactionary nonsense means the old conservative idiots have almost lost.
There’s lots of good signs on the horizon. Federal judges called out Texas for gerrymandering its congressional districts to disenfranchise minority voters. The Trump era has kick started an unprecedented level of civic engagement. Congressional hacks go home to face angry town halls full of pissed off voters.
And as for Trump himself, his first 100 days in office seem to have largely defeated him. He recently told Reuters he misses his old life and didn’t realize the job would be so hard. His list of accomplishments is mostly lies, embellishments or policies no one in there right mind would be proud of. He spends a lot of time playing golf, watching cable news and bitching about the job.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remain vigilant and engaged. We haven’t won — not by a long shot — and it’s going to take a lot of hard work to unfuck everything the Trump administration did when he finally leaves office. But the ascendency of the orange turd doesn’t mean America will soon live under a theocratic boot where women are no better than cattle.
I know, I’m spouting that tired old line about how “it can’t happen here” that invariably paves the way for totalitarian dictatorship. It’s the same line that helped Atwood write the novel. She watched the rise of religious fanaticism in Afghanistan in Iran with growing horror in the 1970s and ’80s. A trip to Kabul just before the Soviet invasion seared the Taliban’s repressive practices into her memory.
“The novel was conceived out of Atwood’s alarm at the frequency with which she heard, from her American friends, the facile expression ‘It can’t happen here’ in response to Atwood’s accounts of ‘excursions into the darker side of religious fanaticism in Iran and Afghanistan,’” fellow novelist Joyce Carol Oates said of the book.
And we should watch out for this stuff, we should fight every time a religious institution attempts to tear down the wall between church and state. We should vote out the assholes who think that crusty old men know what’s best for women’s bodies. But, should a theocracy such as Gilead ever attempt to rise in America, I know the resistance to it will be extreme and violent.
We live in a world where people believe debate the finer points of beating the shit out of nazis. Controversial hatemongers Anne Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos can’t speak at a college without the fascists and antifascists clashing violently. Libertarian social scientist Charles Murray couldn’t speak at a college in Vermont because people rioted.
In the second episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, a flashback explains how sudden anti-women legislation helped create the new world order. Women show up to work one day only for their bosses to tell them they’re no longer allowed to work. Worse, all their bank accounts are frozen and their money given over to their male next of kin. The women took to the streets to protest and the new government opened fire on the protesters.
If something like that went down in the real world, we’d have an insurgency rivaling anything in the Middle East. Violent, women led cells of rebels would plot bombings of religious centers and government buildings. This new resistance would assassinate soldiers in broad daylight. It would be a bloodbath unlike anything we’ve seen in America since the Civil War.
It can happen here, but I refuse to believe that we’d go as quietly as those in Offred’s world. There’s too many guns and too many bad-ass, strong willed women in America to let a pack of religious assholes get away with it.
Stay defiant … but then, I know you will.
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