April 27 I read the book, I watched the movie and yet my eyes welled, my heart skipped a beat during the two minute trailer… “we didn’t wake up until it was too late.” Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Handmaid’s Tale has become a phenomenon, a rallying cry, and a Hulu series with ever-increasing poignancy 32 years after it was written. People are rightly agonizing over this dystopian novel’s reflection of Trump’s America.
In the Republic of Gilead, the setting for Handmaid’s Tale, the New England region of the United States is a theocracy which takes the oppression of women as its foundation. In Gilead, women’s worth and power is reduced to their reproduction. Women of reproductive age and capability have the sole purpose of being babymakers to those who rule. The identity and freedom women once had before the new leaders came to power is stripped from them by force. Those who rebel are publicly executed. As merely baby-machines, they lose their name, their right to work and earn money, their right to read or have an education, indeed their identity and their humanity. Powerless, they are slaves who literally became the property of the men of value. The main character’s new name is Offred. As in ‘Of Fred’ or belonging to Fred. In Gilead those who love the same-sex are deemed gender traitors and hung. People of color are shackled, forced to do back-breaking work in toxic dumps.
Since Trump’s election, sales of the novel have skyrocketed. It has been woven into resistance to the Trump/Pence regime’s war on women. There were many signs at the women’s march. Women wore the handmaid’s costume during protests at the Texas state legislature. This connection that people are making – seeing that this horrific world of Atwood’s imagination is coming to pass – is not hyperbole. As Samira Wiley, who plays Moira in the Hulu adaptation stated, “The rights of women have always — since the beginning of time, men in general have been threatened by the power of women, and have always tried to find a way to regulate, control, or figure us out in some way.” Indeed, everything in Atwood’s book came from things that really happened at some point, in some place, some of which are celebrated in Mike Pence’s beloved bible.
At the heart of the story is the deep understanding that the oppression of women is a cornerstone for fascism. In Nazi Germany, abortion and birth control were banned and Aryan women’s role was confined to incubators for the Reich and servants to their husbands. The Trump/Pence Regime poses grave danger to all of humanity, especially women, and it is the subjugation of women that coheres the very “diverse” strands of American fascism.
Trump is not just someone who brags about pussy grabbing, who insults and demeans women based on their physical appearance, who equates them not bowing down to him to them being on their period. It is not just his owning of the Miss America pageant, not even the fact that he has a litany of sexual assault and harassment claims against him, or his advocating for the punishment of women who seek abortion. He is the leader of the largest superpower and an embodiment of patriarchal rule.
You don’t have to squint hard to see a glimpse of Gilead when groups of men gather to decide the intimate and life-altering health care decisions of women. In Trump’s almost 100 days he has waged a vicious and unrelenting attack on women:
Reviving the “global gag rule” cutting off U.S. funding to all international NGOs that perform abortions or educate people about them. As depraved as it is to enslave women to their reproduction and not let them decide for themselves if, when, and with whom to bear children, it is tripled by the fact that they are cutting off life-saving funding for the host of medical services including HIV/AIDS treatment that these agencies provide. In addition, the regime has cut off funding to UNFPA which provided international support to women so that they may access family planning and pre/post natal health care. These measures are nothing short of a death sentence to vulnerable women and their children across the globe.
Undermining Title X: Title X is the mechanism through which the federal government subsidizes family planning. As such, it has been a target of the Christian Fascists for years. They had already amended it to cut off federal money from directly paying for abortion services. But now, with Pence’s deciding vote, they amended Title X to enable states to cut all funding for any organization that provides abortion services.
Confirming Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Court Justice. Gorsuch has made consistent rulings against the separation of Church and State and has enabled the obstruction of access to birth control and abortion. The Trump/Pence regime’s eyes are on reversing Roe V. Wade. By doing so, 19 states would automatically activate laws already on the books that would effectively end abortion.
But Trump isn’t a Christian Fundamentalist. No, he is a misogynist pig who views women as objects that exist for the pleasure of men. But that is one main reason he has Pence. Because Pence doesn’t view women as sexual playthings. He views them as breeders. Trump and Pence unite on open enslavement of women.
Pence is a rabid Christian Fascist who advocates banning birth control, banning sex-education, and ending sex before marriage. The first Vice President to speak at the “March for Life” is so viciously anti-abortion that he deems it fit for rape victims to be forced to bear their rapists’ children and carry a fetus to term even if the woman’s life is in danger. As Governor of Indiana he cut planned parenthood funding and domestic violence programming, and introduced the most radical anti-abortion state measures ever. These included a requirement for women to bury or cremate the fetus. You can easily envision Pence gleefully hanging gender traitors in Gilead with his record of denying equality to same-sex couples, restricting the rights of trans people, and promoting the torture of gay youth to become straight through “conversion therapy.” Pence is not a voice of reason or moderation but a key reason why this whole regime must be driven out.
Reproductive rights have had a steady beating back over the past several years coupled with extra-judicial tactics that terrorize those who seek and those who provide abortions. But the fascists in the white house are placing women in more danger than ever. We aren’t talking about the state by state wins that quietly chipped away women’s rights during the Obama years but aggressive local impositions of christian fascism with the federal government’s backing and support. All levels of government working around the clock to ensure that women lose their most fundamental rights.
Since January five states have passed major abortion restriction laws, 28 legislatures have introduced legislation banning some or all types of abortion and a total of 431 bills have been introduced to limit reproductive health.
We should all (not just women) be carefully watching this powerful series not just as a “what-if” but sitting with the deeply unsettling parallels it brings up and alarms it sets off within us. Watching it is not for the faint of heart, as it shows with biting clarity the brutality that christian fascist rule would bear down on women. In a recent interview Atwood advised, “‘What sort of a world do I want to live in?’ And if I don’t want to live in that particular world then I should take some kind of a position on any sort of measure that comes in that looks as if it’s leaning to that kind of a world.”
In Gilead, as in Nazi Germany, the people missed their opportunity to act. When they resisted it was already too late and thus the potential of escaping that reality destroyed. “We didn’t wake up till it was too late.” In our case, this window remains open if only for a short and uncertain window of time. For all those who do not want to see us barrel down the path to a Gilead, who don’t want to see the lives of women and LGBT people crushed as their rights and humanity are steamrolled by this regime, this must stir in us a resounding commitment to declare No! We will never let this come to pass. We will fight with everything in our being to make this stop. May we leave Gilead in its rightful place – in book and on screen.