Brutality is happening now

Helen Razer has been “broadcasting and writing her way into disagreement of various scales” over the course of 20 years, a tradition she continues in her misguided review of TV series The Handmaid’s Tale

(“Hood winked”, June 30–July 6). Her central tenet, that The Handmaid’s Tale is more “a cover for the pleasure of violence”, is founded on the false premise that the rape scenes are “frequent, vivid” and “intended not to provoke our feminist thought, but our masochistic female pleasure”. She even dares her sisters to challenge her contention that the rape scenes nourish a distorted “white liberal feminist fantasy” by suggesting that to think otherwise is to admit to being sexually repressed. Undoubtedly, the brutal rape of the nine months pregnant Offred is deeply disturbing, and very hard to watch, but the most unsettling and distressing scenes, in both series, are focused on individual loss of agency, both male and female, in every aspect of life under a corrupt and repressive regime. Systematised brutality has happened, can happen and is happening to members of comfortable, privileged societies across the world and throughout history. The dystopian world of Gilead, created by Margaret Atwood and imagined by the

Hulu series, reflects this hard fact while consciously seeking to avoid “misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour”. Rather than a scoop of reiterated feminist reviews, a closer reading of both the original text and the series might have produced a more interesting critique.

– Lesley Milne, Beechworth, Vic