The Handmaid's Tale and The Toxicity of American Politics

Elizabeth Moss in The Handmaid's Tale.

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The Handmaid's Tale is a fundamental and enduring piece of sci-fi literature. Unfortunately it's resurgence in popularity is based in exaggeration.

I recently read the book, and it only took me a week. That's usually a good litmus test for how much I like a book. If it takes me only a week, I loved it. Some other books that only took a week were Annihilation, Doctor Sleep, Neuromancer, and The Road. And I definitely did love The Handmaid's Tale. It's very thought-provoking, and it's greatest strength lies in it's style. It's not meant to be taken absolutely literally. It is more of a surrealist painting of a dystopia than it is a well-constructed blueprint of one. This is where people start to misunderstand it.

The show, of the same name, has become some sort of toxic political statement that wants to scare you into agreement. It wants you to think that if you let conservatives win, they will enslave your wombs and generally repress you with their unrelenting evil. They have turned the phrase "traditional values" into a curse word, more or less, where to be against abortion means you are necessarily also against gay marriage, birth control, and even women owning property. It is the definition of a slippery-slope argument. This is why I will say that it is emblematic of the toxicity American Politics have descended into.

I feel that the Left's reaction to Donald Trump's presidency is worse for democracy than Donald Trump's actual presidency.

Whilst watching the 4th episode of The Handmaid's Tale, titled "Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum", I typed "Why is Serena Joy such a bitch" on Google. I do this all the time with shows mainly because I'm looking to find online discussions about episodes and characters and what not (you should have seen the shit I was searching for when I was watching Mad Men). One of the first results was an article from New Republic. I could barely make it through the first paragraph without facepalming. Here's an excerpt from the article, entitled "The Handmaid’s Tale Is a Warning to Conservative Women":

"Of course, we don’t divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives; we call them “the help,” “surrogates,” the working class, and the one percent. America has never forced fertile women to bear children for infertile ones, but Trump’s pussy-grabbing presidency has given cover to the sort of blatant misogyny many thought consigned to the past." - Sarah Jones. (https://newrepublic.com/article/141674/handmaids-tale-hulu-warning-conservative-women)

The fact that someone wrote this and genuinely believes it is an accurate comparison to draw between our country and The Handmaid's Tale makes me want to be buried alive. Declaring Trump apocalyptic is certainly in vogue, but in truth it is an exaggeration that doesn't serve our country.

For those who are unaware, each of the classes of women listed above, being Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives, are placed into that class by a strict legal system which forcibly restricts their rights and autonomy. Handmaids are enslaved by the state and given away to "deserving" men for impregnation.

To conflate that to being a surrogate mother requires a level of stupidity and moral arrogance that is dangerous. Being a surrogate mother in our current society does not strip someone of any rights, nor does our labelling of them somehow reduce their humanity. Being a Handmaid in this show, however, does.

People are not forcibly assigned to being "the help", surrogates, working class, or one percent. In the Handmaid's Tale, they are. If they don't abide, they're shot. How anyone could possibly think that these two scenarios are at all similar is baffling to me.

Let's look at another aspect of her claim: "...Trump’s pussy-grabbing presidency has given cover to the sort of blatant misogyny many thought consigned to the past." This sentence right here is exactly what created the Trump presidency and is exactly what I mean when I say that the reaction to him is far worse for freedom than he himself actually is.

The author's claim that Trump's entire presidency is somehow described completely with being "pussy-grabbing" is willfully self-delusional. I'm going to compare this to something said by Ana Kasparian, an Armenian woman working for a "news" organization named after the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, The Young Turks, on election night 2016, otherwise known as the end of democracy, according to every liberal in America. Here's a video of the charming Ms. Kasparian:

"I don't think you're a single issue voter, I think you're fucking dumb." - Ana Kasparian.

In case you're wondering if I got this from some Anti-TYT channel or something, no, they posted that themselves and are evidently proud of it.

If you think this kind of reductionist, vitriolic, hateful, arrogant, and stubborn response to women voting for Trump is better than women voting for Trump, then you're part of the problem.

Who is this going to convince? She's talking about my mother, by the way. Who doesn't actually like Trump, she just feels that he's better for our family business than democrats. But, apparently, that is not a valid reason for voting for him. Apparently she is just fucking dumb and should just listen to the more morally righteous women who are voting in their own best interest which can only mean one thing if you're a woman since all women have to have the same general interest, evidently, because they are entirely defined by a group that they belong to.

Here's the problem with this kind of thinking: it entrenches people in the viewpoints they already have. If someone likes Trump and you say they're a fucking idiot, your chances of successfully convincing them otherwise has fallen to zero. Actually, it's gone below zero, because this response has actually strengthened their beliefs. You call them an idiot, and they respond with "well, fuck you too", and assume that their side is better because at least they aren't calling them an idiot.

Shame on you, women who voted for Trump. You've voted against your best interests, which I have decided for you. You should listen to your betters. Oh, by the way, Ana Kasparian does think she's better than you. Much better.

Worse still is the hypocrisy here. The idea that anyone is better than anyone else is the kind of thinking that ACTUALLY LEADS TO TOTALITARIANISM. Let's look at the premise of the Handmaid's Tale and compare it to our current reality.

In the book and the show, the Republic of Gilead, as it's called, rises to power when the President and all of congress is murdered by "terrorists" and martial law is declared. From there, rights are slowly stripped away until the totalitarian regime can enforce it's will carte blanche. Donald Trump, who is evidently the equivalent of the entire Republic of Gilead, was voted into power by the exact same institutions that elected Barrack Obama. Do you see any problems with the logic yet?

Furthermore, people somehow blame the very forces that actually guarantee their rights to free speech and protest. Now, I'm not one of those people that wants to say to Colin Kaepernick, for example, that "because you have the right to protest, you shouldn't protest" which is about as logically self-collapsing as a statement can be. But I think that when people complain about cops and veterans being somehow opposed to freedom they are misplacing their anger. Here's a scene from The Handmaid's Tale, where peaceful protesters march against the new law banning women from owning property (a law that was not voted on, showing another difference between the show's reality and our country) and are mowed down by soldiers of the new regime.

I believe in people's right to protest. I just think it's absurd that everyone is acting like the scene above is equivalent to what is actually happening in our country.

Here's the sad part: every time you tell someone who voted differently from them that they only did so because they are not as smart as you are, you make the totalitarianism of The Handmaid's Tale more real. When you make politics an "Us vs. Them" scenario, you push people to the extremes of their party's belief systems and they begin to accept things that they wouldn't have otherwise because they would rather vote for the people who accept them than acquiesce to the people calling them idiots. Again, take my mother: she doesn't much care for Trump and thinks he often says stupid shit. But she is more willing to accept these flaws because switching to the other side of politics is far worse in her mind than voting for someone she hates in her own party.

That's the real problem. There are no sides. People should be allowed to speak and vote as they wish and not be hated for doing so.

By reducing the logic and arguments of your opponent to an indefensible point you only further polarize the political environment into a "team" based system, where people will vote for a candidate they dislike just because of where they stand on the political spectrum. Everyone needs to stop equating their identity with what groups they are or are not a part of.

Is Donald Trump a good president? I don't think so. But is he an autocrat of the sort found in The Handmaid's Tale? Of course not, and pretending that he is blinds us to other problems in our politics.

The Handmaid's Tale should not be taken as a literal extrapolation of what will happen to women in the future. The book never sacrifices the strength of its character writing for a broader political point. Margaret Atwood is clearly making a statement, and I have no problem with that. In fact, she successfully communicates her perspective by refusing to reduce any of her characters to two-dimensional, simplistic cardboard cutouts of human beings who are easy to denounce. In my view, she never appears to make the claim that the desire to subjugate is somehow irrevocably tied to maleness. And, to be fair, neither does the show. But some people seem to be trying to make the show more politically immediate than it really is.

The true danger is reducing your opponent to something that is beneath you. This behavior is not limited to either side of the political spectrum. It is a tactic that has been used for hundreds of years: your opponent is less than you, so it's not wrong to hate them or kill them. This logic goes all the way back to the Crusades, where killing an infidel supposedly guaranteed you a place in heaven.

Saying that people only voted for Donald Trump because they're fucking dumb is far worse for democracy than actually having voted for Donald Trump because it paves the way to dehumanization. By failing to understand those who disagree with you, it only becomes harder to reconcile your differences and come to common ground.

This kind of reductionism is apparent in how people have responded to The Handmaid's Tale and have chosen to see it as analogous to our current culture instead of what it is really about: the banality of evil.

This is a concept coined by Hannah Arendt, a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany and later reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal. She described him as not a fanatic but as a rather dull, relatively normal person who was able to justify atrocious actions by suppressing his own ability to reason and was not motivated by pure hatred, but self-advancement.

In other words, this "banality of evil" is defined by complacency and complicity. Arendt was criticized for these words because people only wanted to look at the surface level of what she was saying, and the idea that a normal person could do something monstrous is far more difficult to deal with than the idea that only a monster commits monstrous acts. This, however, closes your eyes to that very banality of evil that enables it; the complicity, the subtle allowances, the appeasement. It is easy to grasp how a dictator is a threat to democracy, but in truth we are not really at a great risk of this happening. Far more dangerous is the dehumanization that average, normal people commit in order to psychologically deal with opposition. The true evil is the refusal to listen, for this leads to a desire to silence the opposition utterly.

This belief that others disagreement is based in stupidity, and not different - but equally valid - beliefs and values erodes our belief in the need for discourse, for compromise, and understanding. If someone votes for Trump because they are a racist, then you simply don't have to listen to them, right? Because their statements and ideas are invalidated by an immoral belief. Thus, true ideological disagreements are reduced to name-calling tirades and ad hominem statements.

This is the far more pertinent threat to democracy. If we constantly denounce the value of other people's opinions, then we begin to allow for the idea of silencing them completely. The idea being that their opinions are so bad that it is better to discount them altogether. The problem is that now a precedent has been set for silencing - and the list of invalidated racists will grow ever longer. Now we have a society in which only the opinions of a few are valid.

This is the danger we face.

The world of The Handmaid's Tale is implausible and far-fetched. If our society was truly facing a population collapse at the hands of infertility (the premise of the show) then why would we suddenly also turn away from scientific methods of aiding fertility and impregnation, such as in vitro fertilization? Why would we choose an incredibly inefficient method, as depicted in the show, where fertile women are enslaved and distributed out to certain men with whom they have sex only once a month? Would they not just pay women to harvest their eggs and have a massive in-vitro fertilization program? Of course in the show this is all predicated on a religious movement, but the logic is flimsy at best. Capitalism would dictate the most efficient method for dealing with a crisis, which is most decidedly not the method depicted in The Handmaid's Tale.

Like I've said, this concept is not meant to be taken literally. It is meant to be a metaphor for the oppression of women and how religious fundamentalism is a dangerous tool in politics, etc. We are not meant to think that this is a scenario that is likely to happen. It's meant to make us wonder about how many people simply accepted their fate instead of continuing to challenge their oppressors. Instead we get scenes where a woman accuses Offred's (formerly June) husband of "being part of the problem" because he says he'll "take care of her", as if this statement is on par with enslaving women. Because it can't simply be that this man loves his wife and wants to protect her, no. It is because of his toxic masculinity that assumes women are in need of protecting at all. Which is apparently true in a world where women's rights are stripped away. Would it be better if he said, "Well, that sucks, I guess you're on your own?"

Regardless, you can see the effort to depersonalize. With this claim, the character abandons the nuance and depth of a real relationship. She simply puts the husband into a box where he has no voice and everything about him is already determined by his gender. Bad qualities are assigned to "toxic masculinity" and are irrevocably tied with maleness, but good qualities are not afforded that same bond. It's absurd. Everyone is equally as capable of having good qualities and bad qualities, and the idea that any one quality is determined solely by your gender is the exact same brand of sexism which allows for the enslavement of women in this fictional universe.

We're putting our focus in the wrong place, where we believe rights are forcibly stripped away by obviously evil people, rather than in the little everyday allowances and reductions and dehumanizations that we all commit, which slowly invalidate the opinions of others, leading us to feel that their voices are not even worth listening to.

This also has the effect of polarizing politics to it's most extreme forms. Practicality and reasonability is thrown out the window, people are told "respectability politics" are unacceptable, that we must not tolerate the intolerant (a leap in logic that actually has you become intolerant yourself), the assumption being that only some things are tolerable and some are not. But who decides what is tolerable?

When some forms of speech are deemed intolerable, then all anyone needs to do is assign any speech that they don't like into that category. The problem is that this will vary from person to person.

Imagine if Barack Obama had determined that the N-word was hate speech (which it is) and that hate speech is illegal. Do you think Trump would use this power to classify jokes at his expense as hate speech?

We've endured bad presidents before. What cannot change is our defense of those basic rights that we have come to take for granted.

It seems, unfortunately, that these are the rights we are most likely to give away. This is what I mean when I talk about the banality of evil. It's very unlikely that Donald Trump would be able to strip away the rights of those he doesn't like - indeed, he's been checked by congress multiple times, even in a Republican controlled Senate AND House. More likely, we will slowly accept ever increasing restrictions of what is or is not acceptable to say, and instead of having it be enforced by the government, it will be enforced by our fellow citizens.

Stop making politics personal. Make it about the arguments. Otherwise, you will just force your opponents into the arms of increasingly vitriolic candidates because they will feel that these are the only ones defending them from being hated. If you make someone feel hated, they will seek out validation; they WILL NOT sit down and question their whole ideology. It's the totally wrong approach to winning people over.

That's what The Handmaid's Tale is really warning you against: blind belief and complacency.

I once had a friend tell me that if I didn't support abortion, I therefore could not fully support women's rights. This type of absolutist ideology is dangerous. I don't think that women shouldn't be able to choose what they do with their bodies, I simply believe that no one should be legally allowed to perform an abortion. The fact that this is mostly the decision of women is incidental. It's not rooted in some secret belief that women shouldn't have autonomy - that is utterly ridiculous. But it's easier to simply say that I am "less moral" than someone else, or that I don't believe in freedom, than it is to understand that I have different values and beliefs.

The purpose of statements such as these is to invalidate my opinion before it is even heard. Do you see how that is actually closer to what this person is accusing me of than my actual opinion is? She is accusing me of wanting to invalidate the opinions of women, which would therefore invalidate my own...hence, she is doing exactly what she is accusing me of doing.

This type of thinking is unacceptable, reductionist, and worst of all, misses the point of The Handmaid's Tale completely!

I love this novel, and the show, while more of a mixed bag, definitely has its merits, particularly in it's cinematography, acting, and characterization.

However, it's funny to me that Elizabeth Moss was also in a far better and more thoughtful reflection of gender relations in Mad Men, the greatest TV show that has or ever will exist. It never shoved anything in my face. It never accused the men of being toxic simply because they were men. In doing so it actually allows you to consider what the writing is wanting to say because it doesn't immediately alienate you by calling you a shitty person by proxy. The writers never make any sweeping generalizations about any characters and is far more thought-provoking as a result.

Don Draper was condescending because he hated himself. Pete Campbell was sexist because lacked confidence and didn't want to have to compete with a whole other group of people. Roger Sterling objectified women because he objectified everyone. Take a look at this scene, where Peggy confronts Don over his lack of gratitude and respect for her work:

Peggy wants to get more than just a paycheck out of her work. Don fails to understand this not because he's a man, but because he has never worked in an environment where anyone ever expressed this desire. He can't comprehend that for some, a paycheck is not emblematic of gratitude. The genders of their characters are only a small part of the overall dynamic here. The rest is made up by their individual, personal qualities.

This has the effect of distancing the audience from the show because Don and Peggy are not just generic stand-ins for all men and women. They are real and dynamic and this gives us a truly nuanced view of how gender plays a role in relationships.

As a society we have to have this same nuanced view. Instead of generalizing, we should be compassionate. Instead of in-grouping and out-grouping, we should examine why we feel the need to belong to a group at all. Most of all, we need to distance ourselves from our politics. This proclivity only serves to make our society more toxic and less compassionate.

The Handmaid's Tale is a great book and a decent TV show. The show, however, is overly simplistic and lacks nuance, all for the sake of drawing inaccurate political parallels.

Try to see your fellow human beings as deep, dynamic, and complicated individuals, instead of merely a generic, blank "friend" or "opponent". And go watch Mad Men again. You can never get enough of that show.