Planned Parenthood organized a protest of Republican healthcare legislation where women dressed like characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale” outside the Capitol building on Tuesday, ostensibly seeking to send some type of dire warning about the impact of the GOP’s latest reform bill.
Activists have staged similar demonstrations around the country in recent weeks.
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” a Hulu series based on the dystopian novel of the same name, depicts a society where women face brutal repression, forced to don the same jarring red robes and white hats the Planned Parenthood protesters wore in Washington this week. As Liz Wolfe described for the Washington Examiner on Sunday, “In [the book], the theocratic Republic of Gilead has conquered the United States in the wake of a fertility epidemic.”
“In Gilead,” Wolfe wrote, “a group of red-robed women called handmaids must serve as human incubators for the upper class of politicians, via rape, centered around their monthly fertility cycle. Women cannot read, are unable to vote, and are not supposed to own property. Dissenters are hanged.”
On what grounds feminists feel it is appropriate to draw comparisons between modern America, the freest and fairest society for our sex to exist in history, and Gilead, all because a healthcare bill will affect access to and funding of Planned Parenthood, is a mystery. The only way Americans will ever experience any taste of Gilead is if feminists continue attempting to convince people that unthinkable fate is imminent. The American patriarchal dystopia is a delusion entirely of their own fabrication.
Look no further than feminist misinformation on the wage gap and sexual assault statistics for evidence that their portrayal of modern life does not reflect the world in which women live. This is what I refer to as feminist fearmongering, a strategy Hillary Clinton has embraced eagerly in recent months. On Tuesday, for example, a Planned Parenthood spokesperson claimed the Senate’s healthcare bill “would be the worst bill for women in generations and decimate women’s healthcare.”
Listening to that rhetoric, one might think Senate Republicans introduced a bill more aptly titled the Transform America into Gilead Act.
If you create your own reality, as the saying goes, with their hyperbolic rhetoric, the women’s movement has created a backward and savage world for its adherents, most of whom seem to be convinced they still suffer at the hands of women-hating patriarchs.
In fact, it’s sad to say the defining characteristic of contemporary feminism is its commitment to promoting victimhood narratives, to persuading young women that our society is not free for and not fair to our sex, rather than celebrating our advancements. Planned Parenthood’s laughably outrageous Handmaid’s Tale protest is a symptom of this disease.
It is somewhat ironic that the only Americans living in Gilead are the feminists who willfully drape themselves in the cumbersome red robes and white hats, marching further away from reality and closer to their own distorted perception of it.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
