That’s what have we here.
The Handmaid’s Tale is to postmodern feminists what Birth of a Nation was to white nationalists. Both are fantasies by which the powerful justify their oppression by imagining themselves to be powerless.
Wealthy career women pretending that they’re slaves, staring at the ground as an aggressive protest, dressing up like nuns, the Amish or other members of religious communities that they despise, is a costuming that reveals the malicious hypocrisy of the lefty protesters, not of their conservative targets.
But The Handmaid’s Tale, a bad book, has always been tainted with pious hypocrisy and bad faith.
Margaret Atwood, its author, drew inspiration from the events of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, but she projected the treatment of women in Muslim countries on to “fundamentalist Christians” in America instead. The Hulu show picks up on the abuses inflicted by the Islamic State on women in Iraq and Syria, and once again projects the abuses of Islamic theocracies on to Trump, Republicans and Americans.
The Handmaid’s Tale appropriates the suffering of women in Muslim countries and uses it to nurture the inflated sense of victimhood of American feminists without ever acknowledging the source. Not only are American feminists appropriating their suffering, but they’re exploiting it for a political cause that is supportive of the Islamic theocracies that are repressing, imprisoning and killing those women.
Gilead, the imaginary dictatorship that oppresses women, really does exist in Iran and Saudi Arabia. It nearly came into being in Egypt and Tunisia because of the “Arab Spring” perpetrated by the Obama administration and backed by some of the same Washington D.C. career socialites who like to pretend that they’re oppressed Christian concubines on the weekends. The Offred cosplayers can be found at lefty conferences and protests alongside Muslim Brotherhood front group activists wearing hijabs.
In Iran women can be arrested for removing their hijabs
If only the women in red could spend a week with the women in black. In Iran.
If only.