In the fourth episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the gripping new Hulu adaption of Margaret Atwood’s novel, Offred, our narrator and heroine, goes to the gynecologist. She lies on an examining table, her lower body, and the male doctor poking at it, concealed from her view by a gauzy white curtain. Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, is a handmaid in Gilead, the brutally repressive patriarchy that has subsumed the place formerly known as the United States, and a handmaid’s job is to reproduce; she is “a womb on two legs,” solemnly raped once a month by her Commander, Fred (Joseph Fiennes), as she lies rigid in the lap of his “barren” wife. At least the official explanation is that she’s barren. The nation’s plummeting birth rates are blamed on its women. Offred’s doctor has a different idea. The Commander is probably sterile, he says. Most high-ranking men in Gilead are. “Sterile. That’s a forbidden word,” Offred thinks. For a woman, to speak it could mean death.

As in the Oceania of George Orwell’s “1984”—as in all authoritarian regimes, and those that would emulate them—language, in Gilead, is a weapon of the state. Handmaids are the chattel “of” their commanders in name as well as fact, and are forbidden from reading or writing on pain of losing a hand. Undesirable words, like undesirable people, are made to disappear by the government; even “hello” and “goodbye” have been replaced by the creepy pieties “Under His eye” and “Blessed be the fruit.” When the Commander breaks the law to ask Offred to see him alone in his office, she thinks that he is after a blow job. What he actually wants is to play Scrabble, and as Offred moves her hands over the contraband tiles you can almost see her brain, dull from neglect, light up with happiness.

I thought of these scenes when I read that another word has apparently been struck from the vocabulary of “The Handmaid’s Tale”: feminism. Last week, at a panel discussion at the Tribeca Film Festival, members of the cast were asked whether they considered the show to be feminist. As Laura Bradley reported for Vanity Fair_,_ the answers came in various shades of “hell, no.” Madeline Brewer, who plays Janine, a handmaid subjected to particularly grotesque abuse—when she scoffs at the new regime’s restrictions on women, her right eye is plucked out—replied that “any story that’s just a powerful woman owning herself in any way is automatically deemed ‘feminist,’ ” and said that the show is “just a story about a woman,” not “feminist propaganda.” Ann Dowd, terrific and terrifying as the Trunchbullesque Aunt Lydia, one of an army of potato-sack-clad matrons who indoctrinate the handmaids with the help of a cattle prod, felt comfortable enough to call on viewers inspired by the show to picket the White House, but not to use the F-word, which she dodged. Weirder still was Elisabeth Moss, who said that Offred’s tale, like that of her character Peggy Olson, on “Mad Men,” is “a human story because women’s rights are human rights.” This is as clear and succinct a definition of feminism as any—Hillary Clinton famously used it in her 1995 speech at the U.N.’s World Congress on Women, in Beijing—except that Moss, too, insisted that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is “not a feminist story.”

All this smacks of some Gilead-style prohibition. Had the cast members been explicitly instructed to distance themselves from the feminism label, maybe for marketing purposes? That seems improbable, considering that in our age of pussy-grabbing Presidents and pussyhats, the word has been rehabilitated from its commercially toxic status and spun into marketing gold. You can find the phrase “feminist as fuck” emblazoned on everything from hoodies to hoop earrings; Dior is selling T-shirts printed with the sentence “We should all be feminists,” after the title of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s TEDx Talk turned book, for a cool seven hundred and ten dollars each. (Proceeds go to charity: Rihanna’s.) Then there are companies, such as the embattled Thinx, peddler of period-absorbent underwear, that proudly brand themselves feminist even as their business practices suggest otherwise. We have corporate feminism, consumer feminism, life-style feminism. In current adspeak, a feminist is someone who buys bras, not burns them.

It seems more likely that the example is being set by Atwood herself. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been hailed as a feminist work since its publication, in 1985, and that characterization has never been a liability; as my colleague Rebecca Mead wrote in her recent Profile of Atwood, the book, a staple of high-school curricula, has sold “so many millions of copies that Atwood considers them uncountable.” But Atwood told Mead that she has an aversion to the term “feminist,” which she felt was used in the nineteen-seventies by women who identified with it to call women like her, who liked wearing lipstick and dresses, “a traitor to your sex.” In a recent Times article, Atwood again bristled at the word: “When you say ‘feminist’ do you mean: Should women have the same rights as other human beings? Then, yes. But what else do we mean by that term? Do we mean women are angelically more perfect than men? Well, no. Women are human beings.”

I take Atwood’s point. The term is elastic, changing with the ethos and the demands of the given era and the individual living in it. I doubt that any two people have exactly the same definition, and for Atwood, as Mead writes, precision is paramount.

Still, echoed by the cast of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the disavowal amounts to a deeply strange evasion of the themes that animate the book and the show. Women’s rights are indeed human rights. But the ways in which women are deprived of those rights—in Atwood’s fiction, and in the reality, past and present, that she bases it on—are unique. It seems oddly rudimentary to point out that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is not just a “story about a woman,” as Brewer had it, or just “a survival story,” as the showrunner, Bruce Miller, told the Times. (“I don’t feel like it’s a male or a female story,” he said, amazingly; at the same time, he and Moss, a producer on the show, had the good sense to make sure to hire female directors for a majority of episodes.) It is a story about the ways in which women are oppressed in a society run by men for their own benefit (no one involved seems to have a problem with the word “patriarchy”), and about how certain women take advantage of the situation to ally themselves with male power for personal gain.

It’s also full of warnings about the danger that comes from failing to recognize that such oppression is categorical, and gendered. In one of the show’s many flashback scenes to the pre-Gilead U.S., a country that looks, disconcertingly, just like ours, Offred—still called by her real name, June—and her best friend, Moira (Samira Wiley, of “Orange Is the New Black”) find that their bank accounts have been frozen. The government has seized the assets of all its female citizens. The women are perplexed, and pissed. “They can’t do this!” they say. But it still feels like a personal grievance, one of the familiar irritations of modern life: the card that doesn’t work, the order that gets lost, the password that needs to be reset, all fixable with a call to customer service. June is on hold with her bank when the coup begins.