Polly Vernon
THE STORY of the reviled ‘ sexy Handmaid’s Tale’ Halloween outfit tells you EVERYTHING
you need to know about Twitter morality and righteous indignation in the modern age. And it’s depressing. One more thing making me wonder if I can even call myself a feminist any more.
It started when an online costumier made a sexed-up version of the red cape and white bonnet costume worn by Elisabeth Moss and her colleagues-in-reproductive-slavery in the brilliant TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s brilliant novel. If you haven’t watched The Handmaid’s Tale, OMG, do! For context: it’s set in a world in which most women are infertile, so the handful who aren’t are enslaved, dressed in red capes and white bonnets, raped by socially elevated masters and forced to carry resulting pregnancies to term. The show was a wild hit among the woke – as well as the non-woke ( people like me, capable of appreciating the political subtext on fine drama without making a big, fat deal about it). The red-cape-white-bonnet optic was promptly co-opted by female protesters at various demos, which I thought was cool; I also thought it was cool – funny! – when my mate swaddled his baby daughter up, handmaid-style, for Instas. Had I had the chance to assess the Yandy costume (where the red cape is slit to the thigh, styled with fishnets), before it got Twitter-damned to hell ’n’ back, I would’ve declared that cool, too. Why? Because you have to appreciate what the original costume symbolises before you can subvert it into something sexy, which doubles down on that original symbolism via irony, while also making it funny, because of irreverence, which I adore, but social media takes a dim view of, because why be irreverent when you could be po-faced, joyless and pseudo-sincere?
Oh, feminist Twitter was ablaze about Sexy Handmaid! ‘No, no, no, no, no, no!’ said one. ‘ There’s nothing like fighting the patriarchy by sexualising a show about misogyny and rape,’ said another. A third called it ‘tone deaf ’, a phrase that gives me the willies because it implies anyone doing, thinking or feeling anything that doesn’t align with whatever half-arsed groupconceived moral stance is making the rounds on Facebook that day must be cast out.
But The Handmaid’s Tale is made up, fiction, a story! I thought. Who exactly is being diminished, offended here? The nonexistent women of non-existent Gilead, a non-existent nation in a non-existent dystopian future, where no one actually wears red capes ’n’ bonnets, or is repeatedly raped, because IT’S. NOT. REAL? But Yandy apologised and disappeared the outfit; and my soul shrank further still.