The Handmaid’s Tale made me think of Afghanistan. Not of the country as it is today, but of the narrative that was blasted around before the invasion to get us all on board with the bombing and killing. “Look at what they do to their women.”
Many women, including the organization The Feminist Majority, supported the war in Afghanistan on exactly those grounds. The ruling government the Taliban were torturing their women, forcing them into burqas and repressive home environments and out of schools and workplaces. Women were being stoned in the streets. We must do something, and that thing must be violent.
By most accounts, the war made things for Afghan women worse, and of course a large number of them died. But we’re still so blinded by the women in need of rescue narrative that a book like We Are Afghan Women: Stories of Hope, with an introduction by Laura Bush, the wife of the man who initiated this suffering, has not been met with widespread outrage and condemnation.
If the television show based on the Margaret Atwood dystopia feels like propaganda, with its depiction of women raped, mutilated, and forced into shapeless cloaks and bonnets in the new American theocracy named Gilead, then it shouldn’t be a surprise viewers are responding to it as such.
There are dozens of thinkpieces claiming this show is all too real and relevant; Atwood herself called it “a documentary” of Trump’s America. Sarah Jones at The New Republic went so far as to compare Gilead to contemporary Texas and Indiana. Women are in peril. We must do something.
If this propaganda is not being used to sell us a war, we should be interested in what it is selling us instead. That so many women are willing to compare their own political situation living under a democratically elected president with no overwhelming religious ideology (or any other kind, for that matter, except for maybe the ideology of greed and chaos), with the characters’ position as sexual slaves and baby incubators for the ruling class, shows that it is always satisfying to position yourself as the oppressed bravely struggling against oppression.
The text and the thinkpieces make it clear who our enemies are: conservatives and Christians. (It shouldn’t be a surprise The New Republic piece was headlined “The Handmaid’s Tale is a Warning to Conservative Women.”)
The novel, long a favorite of college freshmen taking their first women’s studies class, has been hailed since its 1985 debut as a prescient vision of patriarchal domination. Reading it in my 20s, I knew I was meant to sympathize and identify with Offred, who is kept as a forced surrogate mother for the Christian power couple in a society facing widespread infertility.
I knew I was supposed to understand that her reason for not joining the resistance is that she is searching for her own daughter, who was taken from her when she was enslaved. I knew I was supposed to worry that this could be my fate, that this Could Happen Here, given our nation’s misogyny and sentimental notions of motherhood.
I knew I was meant to hate the Christian women who are blind and deaf to their surrogates’ suffering. But this story is too easy. And for me, a white middle-class (ish) straight woman living in New York, to claim victimhood in our society, rather than admit I am a participant in this society who finds herself moving around the spectrum of oppressor and oppressed every day and learning how to examine that, feels disingenuous.
Watching the first episode of the television adaptation, bored and restless, I started to think about who I’d rather have on the screen. Offred has a kind of snarky, hyperbolic inner monologue voiceover, thinking at one point, “I need to grab the nearest machine gun,” and instead just buys some oranges at the market. In the way that most of us tweet angrily about something Trump said and then go back to our lives. I thought of Johanna Kilb, the mother from Heinrich Boll’s 1959 novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine and wished I was watching her instead.
Johanna was unable to just go back to her life in Nazi Germany, even though as a Christian German woman, she was safe from the atrocities. She refused to participate to be the good mother, refused to buy food on the black market to keep her children from going hungry, refused to compromise with totalitarianism to make her life more comfortable.
When she abandoned her family and tried to board the train that was sending her city’s Jewish residents to the camps, refusing to survive a murderous regime even if it wasn’t her the regime wanted to murder, she was hauled off to the asylum instead. Give me that story, I thought, so that we are forced to see what an uncompromising resistance actually looks like.
We all, after all, possess varying levels of complicity with the culture that produced and rewarded Donald Trump. We all compromise for the sake of our comfort, and we all to one degree or another turn a blind eye to suffering that does not directly affect us.
But how much easier to tell ourselves society hates us, how much easier to use those stories to justify violence and war. Claiming victimhood, though, is a quick and easy way to absolve us of our responsibility, without the hard work of reconciling it.