Why The Handmaid's Tale is more relevant one year after the first season
Men: if you want to know what women’s nightmares look like, just watch The Handmaid’s Tale this season. I got an advance look at six episodes and haven’t slept a good night since. (Light spoilers ahead!)
The award-winning show returns this Wednesday, picking up where the book ended: June/Offred in a police van being hauled off to parts unknown. I won’t tell you where she ends up, but I can say that it was some of the most riveting moments in television I’ve ever watched.
What the show does so well – especially now, under the Trump administration – is make its shocking dystopia feel so terrifyingly possible. We see that before the US government has been overthrown by Gilead, its misogynist tenets have already slowly made their way into state law: June must get her husband’s written permission for birth control pills, and when her daughter gets sick in school, June undergoes formal questioning about her parental fitness because she works fulltime.
In other flashbacks from Alexis Bledel’s character, Emily, the lesbian professor is sidelined from teaching because of the increasing antiLGBT cultural sentiment, and is later prevented from leaving the country with her wife and child because their marriage is deemed illegal.
That slippery slope sure seems familiar. Teachers are still fired for being gay in this country, working mothers are still looked at askance (and sometimes punished in custody battles), and multiple states have tried to pass laws that would mandate women have written spousal permission before getting abortions.
And while I don’t want to give too much away, suffice to say that the recent controversy over columnist Kevin Williamson’s statements about women being hanged (and one Idaho politician who believed the same) will seem exceptionally relevant after this season.
That’s part of what makes the show so terrifying – we don’t have to be in full-Gilead to understand that we already live in a misogynist nightmare. American women may not be handmaids, but we are still living in a country where conservative politicians would mandate forced pregnancy. Where women are sentenced to decades in prison for ending their pregnancies. Where a man who believes 25% of the female population should be executed is being hailed as a “singular talent” and “rigorous thinker”.
We don’t have to imagine the worst, because women are already in deep, serious trouble.
The Trump administration, through their very own Serena Joy, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Valerie Huber, is pushing the rhythm method over birth control, and wants to teach women “sexual refusal skills” in lieu of substantive family planning. Onethird of the state abortion restrictions since Roe v Wade was passed have been enacted in just the last seven years. Hate crimes are on the rise for the second year in a row.
And while the rise in feminist activism since Trump’s election has been heartening, we’re still left to grapple with the fact that so many Americans voted for an unrepentant misogynist. And that those voters very likely supported Trump not in spite of his sexism, but because of it.
And so I don’t have much hope that my sleepless nights will come to an end when the series does. Because as beautiful, terrifying, and incredibly well acted as The Handmaid’s Tale is, its true success is holding up a mirror to the horrors we’ve already become so immune to.
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We don’t have to imagine the worst, because women are already in deep, serious trouble