The television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s seminal dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (now streaming on Hulu) opens with a scene of suspense yielding quickly to violence. A woman, a man and a young girl are driving at high speeds on curving rural roads, pursued by an ominous black van. They crash into the shoulder, and as the woman and girl flee on foot into the woods, they hear gunshots.
The rest of the episode’s first half is suspense without the explicit violence – until we see the woman walking with a companion. The bodies of three dead men hang high above the path.
After a screening of the pilot last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, cast members pointed to these men in refuting critics who call the story a feminist touchstone about the dangers of repressive patriarchy.
“I don’t think this is any sort of feminist propaganda. I think it’s a story about women and about humans. You see the three people hanged on the wall were all men. This story affects all people,” said one actress.
Atwood herself has a contentious history with the “feminist” label. In a recent New Yorker profile, she recalled recoiling from the term in the 1960s and 70s: “That initial phase of feminism when you weren’t supposed to wear frocks and lipstick – I never had any use for that.”
But she also told the New York Times last week that if the question is, “Should women have the same rights as other human beings? Then, yes.”
So is The Handmaid’s Tale a feminist story, or is it a story that affects all people? Those ideas are not mutually exclusive. Feminism, the revolutionary idea that women are people, affects everyone, by exposing and trying to repair the damage caused by repressive patriarchy.
Women are the most visible victims of patriarchy and stand to benefit the most concretely from feminism.
Think of the women at Fox News and thousands of other American workplaces dealing with the entitled frat-boy antics of men like Bill O’Reilly.
Then there are survivors of sexual assault, like Chessy Prout, Harmony Reid and Carissa Dowd, and the thousands of women abused and killed by romantic partners every year.
It feels strange in the face of these tragic stories to say, “but men suffer from the patriarchy, too.” But it’s true. As long as traits associated with the “feminine” are considered “less than,” patriarchy will hurt all people.
Think of boys who aren’t athletic, who prefer the arts, who are kind and gentle and are called names like “sissy” or “pussy” because of it. Think of stay-at-home fathers given condescending looks for their choice.
And – stay with me here – think of the angry and confused men of The Red Pill, the dark corner of the internet dragged to light last week when a reporter discovered that the founder is now a New Hampshire state legislator from Belknap County.
I do not defend any of the vile things that posters on The Red Pill say. Their philosophy – that society is in the midst of a gender war caused by “man-hating feminists” who secretly wish to be dominated again by “real men” – is wrong and, frankly, disgusting.
But when considering them on an individual basis, I pity them. Many of their posts reminded me of how The Handmaid’s Tale elicits empathy for its repressed male characters.
In the novel, where young women are considered expendable breeders for the holy society, young men are considered expendable soldiers for the holy war. Those who return from battle are rewarded but even the high-ranking Commanders pay a price through emotional isolation, which is dehumanizing in its own way.
The men of The Red Pill see the world changing around them and they have no tools to cope. They feel expendable, because they cannot assume, as they think previous generations could, that holding a steady job will give them the female adulation they assume “a real man” deserves.
Instead, women today can work and support themselves. Many of us are able to ask more of potential life partners than just financial security. We seek compatibility, certainly, and intellectual stimulation, and also respect.
Those requirements are apparently daunting to “red pillers.” Instead, they congregate online, strategizing ways to reassert their dominance. But they pursue an outdated patriarchal definition of “real men.” If they earn the most money, if they lift the most weights, if they repress their emotions and their vulnerability deep enough, they are told they can be kings. When it doesn’t work, they blame feminism for turning women into entitled, ungrateful shrews.
In truth, I think they must be so lonely, afraid to reveal their true selves to their intimate partners in real life. And so I pity them as I pity the repressed Commanders.
We need more feminist stories like The Handmaid’s Tale to expose how strict gender roles are harmful to women and men alike. And we need more people with public platforms – including the cast and creators of The Handmaid’s Tale – to own and defend feminism for what it really means.
Atwood famously did not invent the world of The Handmaid’s Tale whole cloth. She collected dozens of newspaper articles about repressive policies and reactionary panics to falling birth rates, scientific progress and environmental disasters. She claims nothing done to the women in the book has not been done to women in the real world at some point.
When the book was banned from a Texas school district, she wrote in a letter defending it: “If you see a person heading toward a huge hole in the ground, is it not a friendly act to warn him?”
(Sarah Palermo lives in Hopkinton.)