Our Handmaid’s Tale Hysteria
7th September 2021
If you read one book this fall, make it The Handmaid’s Tale TV show. And then don’t read another book, ever again, if you want to remain au courant on Twitter.
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, and the more recent Hulu series, which depict a futuristic America called Gilead where women are treated as breeding chattel, have become a political obsession. They’re used as a kind of shorthand by the trendy left for the medieval theocracy my fellow pro-lifers and I are supposedly hammering together in our spare time. This totalitarian state is evidently being built over the scaffolding of the lawless Randian anarcho-syndicate we were accused of building just a few years ago. But then those kindly old ladies praying rosaries outside abortion clinics are nothing if not adaptive.