Since its first season, The Handmaid’s Tale has been upheld by many women as a rallying cry for the feminist resistance. The image of red robed and white bonneted women from the classic feminist text has become as celebrated as Rosie the Riveter. It has been referenced in any number of striking signs held up by members of the Women’s March, and has even been donned by groups of women protesting regressive and dangerous policies that threaten female autonomy and reproductive freedoms. There is a pressing feeling among many feminists that watching The Handmaid’s Tale is important, despite the fact that, like many shows on television, each hour-long episode catapults the viewer into a world where violence against women is constant.

In shows like True Detective and Game of Thrones, the focus on female debasement is often criticized precisely because female suffering is positioned as entertainment. What happens on The Handmaid’s Tale is different, as violence against women plays out as a kind of morality tale. Throughout the first six episodes of the second season we see female characters hit, punched, beaten, branded, raped, kidnapped, psychologically tortured and physically and emotionally scarred. Much of the violence enacted on women is done by women – the handmaids are at the mercy of the aunts and wives who require obedience and submission, even though they too are obviously getting a raw deal in Gilead. Many of the show’s most uncomfortable scenes are not ones of outright violence, but scathing satires of domestic bliss, where the barren wives celebrate pregnancy with odd ceremonies that render the handmaids not only invisible, but less than human.

In this way, The Handmaid’s Tale is far less interested in how the patriarchy is perpetuated by men than in how it is upheld by many women. Indeed, while many of the handmaids strive to protect each other, the wives, aunts and econowives are, at best, useless, and, at worst, cruel oppressors in their own right. In the world of Gilead, class and gender are the ultimate arbiters of status, and, as Angelica Jade Bastien points out for Vulture, the “spectre of white womanhood” that underscores so much of the show is never fully interrogated. Instead, viewers are invited into Gilead through the eyes of a white, privileged, fertile (and, hence, relatively young) woman who suddenly has all of her privileges stripped away, and much of season two is about Offred’s mounting sense of regret that she could have done more to have prevented this from happening in the first place. We see June mourn the way she treated her mother, an ardent feminist, who desperately wanted her daughter to stand up for her own rights, and we see her lament the way she treated her husband’s ex-wife, who begged June not to steal her husband away from her.

Throughout all of this, the viewer is meant to identify with Offred’s suffering and, at times, self-flagellation. The logic seems to be that if viewers immerse themselves in a full-stop feminist nightmare, they will, somehow, achieve a kind of catharsis that will spur us them onwards to greater action, to prevent a future Gilead from actually occurring. In an interview withHuffPost, the show’s creator, Bruce Miller, discusses how he actually sees the show’s ostensibly bleak arc as optimistic.

“I always feel like the show is hopeful because our world is not Gilead,” he said. “It always makes me feel like, wow, if Offred could take a stand and try to change things in her world, what am I doing sitting on the couch? I should be able to change the things in my world.”

Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaid’s Tale. Photograph: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Likewise, in the Guardian, Elisabeth Moss, who plays Offred, describes how she sees turning away from the show because of its violence to be a kind of cop-out.

“I hate hearing that someone couldn’t watch it because it was too scary,” she said. “Not because I care about whether or not they watch my TV show; I don’t give a shit. But I’m like, ‘Really? You don’t have the balls to watch a TV show? This is happening in your real life. Wake up, people. Wake up.’”

Is looking at imaginary violence necessary to promote social change? I find myself puzzled by the logic of this. After all, the majority of viewers of the show are already self-described feminists who are wary of the current administration. And, as many female critics have pointed out, the second season’s obsession with violence makes it a little exhausting for anyone to watch, let alone someone who doesn’t already agree with the show’s ethos.

Sophie Gilbert at the Atlantic wonders whether it is necessary to make viewers endure so much visceral suffering, especially at a cultural moment when “the endless revelations that have emerged since October about abusive men in the entertainment industry and beyond have felt wearying in their range and detail”. Likewise, at the Cut, Lisa Miller considers whether the violence against women we see throughout the series counts as “torture porn”, looking at the ways in which Offred’s suffering is part of a biblical and literary tradition in which “the bravery of the heroine is intensified by her victimhood”.

My frustration with season two is less about its fixation on violent imagery (I’m a fan of lots of violent shows) than on what I see as a veritable lack of imagination in presenting these images in the supposed service of social justice. I don’t think there is any compelling evidence that watching images of female suffering alone will lead to social change and, as Miller points out, one of the reasons that The Handmaid’s Tale images don’t always seem to be galvanizing viewers to action is that they stem from a longstanding tradition of seeing the female experience as inherently painful. It’s hard to imagine a world without female suffering if you keep coming back to these same tired motifs, which are pretty much everywhere in our culture, and I find it frustrating (sexist, even!) that women who have to endure misogyny every day are then scolded for not wanting to see it unfold onscreen.

In this way, it saddens me that The Handmaid’s Tale has become the quintessential feminist text of 2018 when so much of its ethos is about making women feel angry, sad and guilty about the state of the world we live in. When I mentioned to female friends that I was watching The Handmaid’s Tale for an article, many said they should be watching it, even though the experience of doing so left them feeling completely and utterly hopeless. Others explained that they had to parse it out, watching each episode as if they were taking a horrible yet necessary medicine. Is this the sign of a successful feminist enterprise? Certainly, The Handmaid’s Tale fits in our current zeitgeist in terms of acknowledging the extent that women are suffering in a misogynistic world. And yet, I think that its creators are actively missing what is most exciting about Time’s Up and #MeToo: the fact that women are already actively working to imagine a world where it’s female pleasure, rather than suffering, which is utterly and completely normalized.