At the same time, as Emily Nussbaum notes in her New Yorker review of the TV adaptation, Atwood also imagined her religious totalitarians borrowing in certain ways from the feminism of her era — including both the tendency of Reagan-era feminist thinkers to join Christian conservatives in a stinging critique of Penthouse-style smut and the (related) fears about rape and male predation that crested with the era’s crime wave and inspired “Take Back the Night”-type movements in response. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” even as feminism itself is smashed and females subjugated, those narratives get appropriated and incorporated into Gileadan rhetoric about protecting women and restraining men: It’s “Biblical fascism sold with faux-feminist icing,” as Nussbaum puts it, more effective because it claims to be responsive to its victims’ professed fears.

But precisely because of the ways that Atwood’s novel plumbed and surfaced the specific anxieties of 1985, her story is necessarily time-bound and context-dependent and in certain ways more outdated than prophetic. So adapted for our later era, “The Handmaid’s Tale” feels like more like an alternate-history universe in the style of “The Man in the High Castle” than an exercise in futurism. Which should make the adaptation an opportunity to study the contrasts between our actual post-Reagan trajectory and Atwood’s imagined path to Gilead, and to see our own particularities afresh.

The first contrast lies in the development of American feminism, which has acquiesced to certain trends that it found troubling 30 years ago — including not only the ubiquity of pornography but also the practice of surrogacy, the class-bound commodification of childbearing, that Atwood’s Gilead biblicizes and places under patriarchal control. As a consequence, as Charlotte Allen put it in a polemical but perceptive column recently, to the extent that modern life has given us a Gileadan hierarchy of wealthy older women who have younger “handmaids” bearing children for them and domestic “Marthas” working as the help, it exists in the enlightened precincts of upper-class liberalism — as a support structure for lean-in feminism, not a form of patriarchal control.

The second contrast lies in the fizzling of the post-1970s religious revival, the defeat of the religious right on practically every issue save abortion and the waning of the religious case for female domesticity. Atwood invented Gilead at a time when conservative Christians still plausibly imagined American culture as theirs to “take back” and when a backlash against women in the work force was a meaningful part of social-conservative politics. But in our era, religious conservatism feels haunted by fears of looming persecution, younger religious conservatives have largely adapted forms of gender egalitarianism, and the argument from religious premises that a woman’s place is in the home is confined to intra-evangelical spats, with little broader influence.

Which leads to the final contrast — namely, that the misogynistic currents that Atwood envisioned being incorporated into her fundamentalist dictatorship, the feelings of male impotence and uselessness that the Gileadan commander in “The Handmaid’s Tale” invokes as a justification for his religious revolution, have instead become more culturally potent as secularization has advanced and men have been cut loose from Christianity and domesticity both.

Thus instead of a mass movement of marching Christian soldiers, we have a diffuse quasi-movement of men’s-right’s activists, pickup artists and woman-hating online trolls that’s (sort of) coalescing around the alt-right banner. Instead of a world where old-fashioned religious Puritans are trying to reinstate Leviticus, we have a world where the Puritans’ real cultural heirs, the moralistic post-Protestants of academe, are trying to impose a different, consent-based set of sexual regulations — while a laddish, bro-ish and, yes, Trump-ish bachelor culture laughs their prudery to scorn.