“The Handmaid’s Tale” is many things. It’s a pointed meditation on the inevitable human exploitation posited by utilitarian societies that prioritize some woolly greater good. It’s a dystopian exploration of what the world may become in the case of a global ecological and biological disaster. And it’s a piece of art that oscillates between masterful to self-indulgent.
What the television adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel certainly is not, however, is a representation of contemporary America.
For all of the left-wing hand wringing over Vice President Mike Pence and all the hysteria over our nonexistent constitutional right to third-trimester abortions, “The Handmaid’s Tale” itself proves that America is actually a pretty great place to be a gal!
In the third season premiere, there’s a scene that wouldn’t be out of place on our southern border. Emily, an escaped “handmaid” — i.e., one of the few remaining fertile women in the fictional Gilead, assigned to a master and ceremoniously raped to produce offspring — is salvaged from a stream by a cop.
“If you return to your home country, would you be persecuted based on being a woman?,” a cop asks Emily, who’s smuggled her friend’s infant daughter from the theocratic Gilead to safety. “Would you be subject to the danger of torture or risk to your life? As a person in need of protection, do you wish to seek asylum in the country of Canada?”
Replace “Canada” with “the United States” and you have the reality for thousands of refugee women from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala every year. More than 14 women out of every 100,000 from El Salvador will be murdered. In Honduras, that figure is more than 10, and in Guatemala, it’s 9.1.
In the United States, it’s only one.
Although the story behind the government and technology of Gilead is fairly complex, for most of human history, women were treated a lot more like they are in “The Handmaid’s Tale” than they are in contemporary America. Women have historically been treated like chattel, prized solely for their utilitarian purposes in the bedroom and the kitchen, and subjected to the violent whims of men. We are the exception. Countries like America or Canada — both in the show and in reality — that women are coming to for salvation are history’s rare outlier, not the norm. The return of “The Handmaid’s Tale” simply reminds us of that.
