So apparently Margaret Atwood worships the Phallic Monster called patriarchy now.

The whole outrage started a couple days ago when I saw the first article about how The Handmaid's Tale might be too violent for television. That was sort of alright. Still tremendous bullshit, but alright. Now this unyielding nonsense...

I am truly baffled as to how The Guardian survives, but I guess it has to keep up with everyone else's tabloid diarrhea, so here goes...

I have watched the first season of The Handmaid's Tale and it's brilliant. I don't watch many shows, but I bawled over this and couldn't stop watching it.

It is about women. Unquestionably so. It is about being a woman—its difficulty, its pleasure, and the ordeal that life is. The dystopian setting only enhances the problems women today face, so it's not too far-fetched either. To me it seems it was only given an artistic push so the blade of the "feels" would be driven deeper.

The main character, June, loses her child when she's fleeing and is unsure whether both he and her husband made it out of Gilead. She is fertile so she is enlisted as a handmaid, a sort of in-house prostitute/baby-factory. She makes good with the Commander who she belongs to in order to have some freedom while enduring the humiliating ritualistic intercourse that the new order enforces on handmaids.

We don't only see her struggle, but the surrounding characters face their own little personal hell as well. We see the Commander's wife engulfed and then consumed in jealousy and despair, envying June for having an intimacy with her husband she has already lost and wanting a child so she could get out of the housewife role that never really suited her.

You see, a handmaid mutilated as a punishment, see one of them escape, see the compassion women have for each other. Their resilience against it all—and fallibleness too. You see the animalistic rage unleashed on a single man who dared to rape a handmaid.

Perhaps one of the most powerful moments is when a fellow handmaid, blinded out of punishment, faces the crude reality of the husband, despite his whispered promises of marrying her and eloping, not delivering on said promises. She takes her newborn child and is ready to jump off a bridge into the icy water.

We all know it's the right choice—for her, not the baby. June volunteers to step forward, but you see the internal battle in her. She would jump. She wants to tell her to jump. Her every fibre yearns for a freedom—any sort of freedom. She knows dying is at the end of both choices whether the other handmaid decides to fall or come down. You wish they had a choice, but they don't.

June persuades the handmaid to hand the baby over. She jumps, but survives. She is sent to the Colonies to shovel toxic waste and die a painful death.

It cuts to your soul when June screams for her son from a locked car while her accomplice, the family's chauffeur, and June's sex-toy, can do nothing to ease her pain.

It's about what we, women, all are—the jealous wife, the longing mother, the vixen, the sacrificial lamb, the rebel.

Yes, it is set in a world ruled by men. We see it through June's eyes, but she's not the only one oppressed. Serena Joy, the wife, was an activist, had written books, and is rendered for a half existence without anything that would buffer this bleak reality for her. Even the Commander is trapped in a pursuit for status that he can only gain with a child which he presumably wanted from his wife but could not get and now has to procure from a stranger in the least sexual way possible. He is stuck without a child, in a hateful relationship only absolved by a successor which became a symbol of absolute power in a barren world.

I believe that Margaret Atwood tried to point out how much worse we could have it; how, while we may feel like men rule the world, women still are the conductors of this messy performance from behind the scenes with their clever tactics and feline assertiveness. She wanted to illustrate what it would be like if that not so obvious power would've been taken away completely. If it were to be the world of men, truly.

What the article critises is that all these amazing characters bow their heads and comform to the ruling of men. They basically complained that there aren't any of them in leading positions in the society of Gilead—like they usually do.

However, conformity does not imply private agreement with the external values surrounding them. Compliance is a means for an end. They confirm to survive. And if you noticed, it isn't only women who have to abide. Nick, the chauffeur, is just as bound by his duties as June is, albeit different ones at that.

Patriarchy is not the ruler, autocracy is. The cringe, the uncomfortable feeling after watching the Commander have sex with June, her head resting in Seren Joy's lap, is there because we know this is not how it should be. We know that reproduction is not a soulless, automatic process. You cannot force nature, intimacy, or impregnation.

For those who cannot stomach it because it became too bloody or violent despite the common belief that because it is heralded as a feminist show one must watch it, do yourself a favor— just don't.

The acts depicted in the series are not uncommon in actual life. Autocratic rule lives by the principle of terror. There's still genital mutilation, rape, and other types if violence in this world—some governed by religious dogmas. You turn a blind eye to a fake setting on TV, you turn away from reality in its harshness.

No, The Handmaid's Tale is not feminist according to the modern third-wave feminist definition, thank God. Its feminist value is in females fighting against actual oppression, not the imagined, fairy-tale, perceived oppression some of us claim to live in in the First World so that people would feel sorry for us and could gain more benefits that way.

The kind of oppression that sentences a young women forced into a marriage she didn't want; the kind that allowed her to be raped when she didn't want to consummate the marriage; the kind where it was acceptable for people to believe it was okay to hold her down and keep her that way by none other but her dear husband's relatives. The kind of oppression where before he attempted to rape her for the second time, she stabbed him to death out of self defense; the kind where the dead husband's family decide whether she lives or not.

So stomach it or not, face it or not, I will fight anyone who dares to claim The Handmaid's Tale is not feminist enough. Whoever does clearly has no idea what that 'f' word means, anyway.