Last night I watched the penultimate episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, you know, that series when a dystopian society goes, well, bad. Where religion is used as a cruel tool of coercive control to dehumanise humanity; where women’s reproductive rights, already under insidious attack by a flatlining global birth rate, ecological collapse, and our legally enshrined ability to be in charge of our own biological destiny, are removed with a patriarchal hand so deft, so full of its own millenia strong utter righteousness we see the knife coming then wonder, still, why we feel its stab. Where man-datory, ceremonial procreation – yes, rape – is deemed a sacred societal act. Where, in watching, we actively feel the fear of losing our loved ones and our freedoms for subjugation into a society constructed on such pious horror, at the same time we continue to bear witness to humanities’ inhumanity, playing out in real time across the globe.
What was the most surprising element of this? That I’m still watching the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s sublimely written, chillingly inspired from real life events literary portent? That all I seem to hear from others who fell by the viewer wayside is how bleak, how dark, how just too much it is, how they just could not watch it, at the same time that media and technology live stream to them a world in perennial conflict, bearing more than a passing ecological, reproductive, morally reprehensible, religiously constructed resemblance to Gilead?
That I actually made it (to the edge) of my sofa, awake, to watch television?
From season one, The Handmaid’s Tale has spoken to me in its every reproductive desire, feeling and conflicted nuance. It has granted me the emotional space to fully feel my own despair, rage, anger and brokenness at unexplained infertility, miscarriage, the slow death and rebirth of my own parenting dreams. Season by season has accompanied me through every phase, luteal or otherwise of never knowing if I would become a mother. In a decade long undecider where society’s openness about IVF and baby loss and never having a baby was scarcer than an NHS fertility clinic, from 2017 I had a cultural outlet, in the privacy of my home, that finally understood the sheer dystopic hell in my head and heart. I felt the intensity of every injection (5-6 a day sometimes people!) drug, appointment, embryo transfer and dark thought in my head and heart was reflected, lived, by its characters. Their world had shrunk; so had mine. They were finding ways to survive the unsurvivable; so, in my head, was I. They were operating in a new community, forced upon them by Gilead, far away from family and friends, from everything and everyone that had defined their normal. They knew their world no longer felt safe; from my inability to board trains and planes, so did I. That bad things didn’t just happen to other people, that parents couldn’t wave a magic wand and a chocolate bar for the child within and make everything better.
I felt, as they say in the business, seen.
The physical, cataclysmic rupture between June and her young toddler daughter: every mother’s living nightmare. Serena’s utter desperation and obsession for a baby, her unshaken belief this would be the crowning glory to her marriage, her status, her duty, her sense of self. Her transformation from perpetrator to mother and finally to ally when the men of Gilead betray her once again. The hot as hell sex between June and Nick that grew into love, bore their precious daughter and ultimately sowed the seeds of Gilead’s demise. The realisation that physical desire and love will always find a way in the most brutal and barren of circumstances; that in some way – if these characters could do it –it was, whisper it, okay to allow yourself intimacy, perhaps even to enjoy it in the cycles of loss and grief. The slow, existential dawning that be it bible, fable or science, we are a species: and if we don’t procreate we die. Wow. Just imagine if men could give birth? Biology didn’t get the equal birthing opportunities memo and boy, it has made it a woman’s responsibility since the dawn of fucking time (shout out to seahorses for Solo Parent By Choice-ing). Patriarchy or matriarchy, we’re never going to be stopped being appraised are we? Commented upon, judged, sized up, politicised, theorised, demonised by some about what we choose to do with our wombs; because the world’s politics and economics is counting on us to make it continue.
And if you’re a woman who loves her husband, got involved with him when he was married to another woman, and then has the audacity while surviving in hell to fall for another man, have his baby and stay in a relationship with both of them? Under his polyamorous eye! We all knew that while June loved her husband Luke, for her it was Nick. Always Nick. Even when he betrayed her and the women at Jezebels for a last chance at fleeing Gilead together; even when she saw him step on that plane, beyond redemption (add to notes: the double agent’s last act was to confirm June’s survival with Lawrence), Nick’s love for June helped him to survive and drove him further into the darkness to do so. I doubt June could have survived and fought Gilead without him and their baby Nichole. I don’t doubt that in spite of everything she still loved him when he boarded that final flight. Elisabeth Moss’ eyes said it all. The salient reminder that the most painful betrayal always comes from those closest to us, and we will never, ever see it coming.
These complex characters have held me at every twist and turn of my own life, my own biological decisions. I have felt and understood their respective isolations, the underworld they inhabited and made the best of. They kept me company during the grimmest of IVF cycles, two week waits and litany of early miscarriages. Nick went from hot, very fucking hot to stone cold fuck no depending on my oestrogen levels and banter with Emma Cannon, also Team Nick. My investment deepened when my son was in my arms and I had access to a more compassionate way of thinking. My own parents suddenly human, fallible, with their own mysteries not my business to solve; doing the best they could with what they had. What our son could eventually think of me; how trying your best is no guarantee of success. The acting, particularly Aunt Lydia, has sent true shivers down my spine and a flood of cortisol in my body. In turn I have held on because I know the reckoning, the denouement is coming. I am familiar with this extremity of feeling, this need. It was part of me for many, many years.
I am invested in these women, these “prisoners of wicked, godless men.” And I am bringing up a boy, our son, in a world with smartphones, AI, social media, Andrew Tates, activism, Adolescence, Elliot Rae’s podcast To Be A Boy, and the realisation that we have quite rightly pushed feminism and must continue to push feminism with the understanding it is equity. Team work. Support. My boy, one day an adult, inspired by male and female role models, taking care of his partner, be that woman or man, knowing he can help them, himself, his family, his friends, his work colleagues thrive. Because none of us are getting out of here alive. And when I think about this and the history of society and religions and see how the media and politics operate and sit on the bog wondering how I am going to teach my boy to look for the truth, evidence based facts, nuance, empathy, to read widely, to nurture himself, his family, his community, his earth….I think just how too much it is. That the news I just could not watch it and I sit there, sometimes, and my heart cries. And I watch the news, and put my undergraduate history books of holocaust, genocide, witchcraft, and general inhumanity on the bookshelf next to where my son plays. I put on my armour, my thin veneer of being a parent to a little boy throwing things at me then clutching me around the neck for cuddles and I think: slowly. Slowly. We will teach him slowly.
I think of Commander Lawrence looking at June on those plane steps, finally doing the right, sacrificial thing. Patting his heart. He knew the truth. We are already living many elements of The Handmaid’s Tale. We all know, deep down, we cannot afford anymore to look away. By the luck of birth and geography this is not yet us. We can all positively influence our own little corners. We can all help equip the generations below and above us to do, to think better, differently. The alternative is now no longer available.
Under their eye.
maybehood.com 