Manmade tale of shrinking gap between UK and the US zealots
SERIES two of dystopian drama The Handmaid’s Tale reached its conclusion on Sunday and had me strung tighter than piano wire.
The show is based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, set in the fictional Christian fundamentalist regime of Gilead, where women are treated as property of the state.
Part of the fascination, apart from it being riveting TV, is its disturbing prescience in a world where the prevailing wind carries a whiff of totalitarianism.
It’s a harrowing watch but “praise be”, there’s also a really hot guy in it.
When Atwood wrote the novel The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she ensured every torturous element had precedence in reality.
It’s a good indicator of what a raw deal all religion tends to be for women. Perhaps that is why this week the Humanist Society found women in Scotland were less likely to be religious.
Most of Atwood’s inspiration is fiction based on fact – drawn mainly from Christianity, not Islam.
Those like Boris Johnson who use faux feminism as a Trojan horse for Islamophobia conveniently omit the fact that Christianity is familiar with subjugating the ladies.
“Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” and all that.
Handmaids like the story’s main protagonist June are transgressors, consigned to the role of human incubators for commanders who have infertile wives – an idea straight from the Bible. June refers to being reduced to a “two-legged” womb, as most religions have long perceived women.
The puritanical garb of the handmaids is based in part on nuns’ habits as well as the niqab and it’s a puritanical outfit which Boris may muse is the red of postboxes.
Atwood said: “Since I had grown up hearing that you weren’t decently dressed without a girdle and white gloves, I thought I could understand such a thing.” When I was teenager, at the time she wrote the novel, women in miniskirts were “asking for it”.
Single mothers were pariahs and husbands were allowed to rape their wives – to honour and obey, after all.
Girls weren’t banned from wearing trousers at my “secular” school and my religious Protestant friend was forbidden by religion to cut her hair.
In my first national newspaper newsroom, the all-male executive dictated women shouldn’t wear trousers.
Women’s bodies and their clothes have long been getting the patriarchy’s pants in a twist.
But whether we want to dress in burqas or boob tubes is not anyone’s goddamn business. We certainly don’t need the xenophobes like Boris or the alt-right of Tommy Robinson using women as human shields in their war on Islam.
Robinson and his ilk hanker for a return to “British values”, by which they mean keeping immigrants out and women in their place.
As Atwood said in her novel: “Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
A key lesson in The Handmaid’s Tale is how tectonic shifts in societies begin with incremental movements – gradual, barely noticeable erosions.
The UK is certainly not on the verge of turning into Gilead but the tide of right-wing populism is worth watching.
Whatever Boris wants us to believe, the UK is not under threat from the spectre of Muslim fundamentalists.
His is a conjuring trick, a contrived spectacle, distracting our eyes from the pernicious ambitions hidden up his sleeve.
While Islam has been misinterpreted by some to impinge horribly on women’s rights, Christian fanaticism is a more realistic fear here.
Trump’s former chief strategist and “Christian zionist” Steve Bannon has weighed in to the Boris debate, declaring he would make a “great prime minister”.
Unfortunately, the prospect is not dystopian fantasy and Bannon is said to be “advising” Boris.
So, the degrees of separation contract between the UK’s powerhouse and American Christian zealots.
Good Conservative women, say Bannon, “would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children”, and not be a feminist “bunch of dykes”.
It could be a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale.