Sex and Politics: Thoughts on The Handmaid's Tale

Originally published July 22, 2017

I haven't known what to blog about recently because all I've been thinking about is sex and politics. One is too personal and the other too broad.

We are currently between seasons of the real-life zombie horror show that is the Trump administration's attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but for a while I could barely focus on anything except the threat of 22 million Americans losing their health insurance. When I wasn't working I was on a full diet of news and political podcasts, and sex was there as a stress relief. (My wonderful partner is also part of the stress relief. I want to give him credit without being too personal. He's watching The Handmaid's Tale on his phone as I write this.)

As a sex-positive millennial I can admit on the internet that I like and have sex (gasp!), and there's hardly a day when I don't feel incredibly grateful for the women and feminists who came before and me and fought hard so that I may do so. But we are still fighting. Since I want to run for political office someday, I can't get into any juicy details. (Not that it may matter. Other reasons I may be ridiculed if I attempt to run for anything: weed-smoking, atheism, bisexuality, speaking loudly while being female, not looking hot in pantsuits, looking too hot in pantsuits, not being married, not eating ice cream on the campaign trail due to lactose intolerance.)

Plenty of sexy and smart people have sex and politics writing covered. What I want to talk about is sex in politics. Or should I say, politics in sex. We are living in a time where the government is being "run" by a sexual predator, but this administration is more hostile to women, the LGBT community, access to birth control, sexual and reproductive health and abortions than any administration has been in roughly fifty years. In a New York Times op-ed called The Playboy President and Women's Health, Michelle Goldberg points out this insulting dichotomy, arguing that Trump is not an evangelical or social conservative and yet is attacking women's health and sexual freedom on all fronts. Mike Pence at least has the decency to pretend that he believes his twisted moral logic; it appears that Trump simply has so little respect for women as humans that he will sign away their rights with one hand and assault them with the other.

Recently, two of my closest female friends and I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale together. We sat on my porch and drank wine while we talked about it and brainstormed what we will do if this administration is successful in its attempts to get us as close to its world as possible. (I can only assume that Mike Pence keeps it by his bedside as inspiration. I do too, but for different reasons.) We talked about the moments in the book that scared us the most: the moments where we saw on the page what we can see in the world around us. The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopia, set in a future America that has been taken over by a misogynistic, racist, Evangelical government and turned into the surveillance state of Gilead. Women have been stripped of all rights and autonomy and divided up among the powerful men as property, and since there is a fertility crisis, the Handmaids are young, potentially fertile women who are being used as sex slaves. Abortion is, of course, outlawed and punishable by death.

The moment where our narrator, Offred, speaks of her "training" to become a Handmaid. One of her fellow prisoners, it is discovered, was sexually assaulted as a teenager and had an abortion. The aunts, the women running the training (but who, though they have some power, are also subjects of the men in charge), ask the Handmaids in training whose fault the assault was. Her fault the Handmaids chant in unison.

The moment where Offred reveals that in this society two women must testify to the same thing in court since "evidence from a single woman is no longer admissible."

The moment where Offred recalls her mother, who has been either murdered or thrown away to indefinite manual labor, for the crime of being old.

I think about the way things are now; the way women are blamed for their own sexual assaults (what was she wearing?), the way they are routinely not believed when they take their cases to court (she must have wanted it), the way women are cast away by society as they age and lose their (perceived) attractiveness. In our patriarchal society women are valued or devalued based on how men relate to them sexually. Of course there are individual men who value women as fellow human beings. I am lucky enough to know a lot of them. But until all of us and our culture in general can truly value women as people, we will remain one step away from The Handmaid's Tale, and creeping ever closer.

Since I know at least a few of my friends are reading this, a new thing I am trying as a way to close out my posts are some recommendations. This month I've been listening to Pod Save America and Pod Save the People as ways to stay up on the world and stay energized without losing my damn mind. This article in The Guardian does a great job of detailing the misery that Trump's expansion of the global gag rule is inflicting on women worldwide. And for a change of pace, The Big Sick is the best romantic comedy and most beautiful movie I've seen in a while and a good way to forget about this whole mess for two hours.