I know I haven’t posted in ages– life mental health survival etc. But I’ve been watching the Handmaid’s Tale, and it strikes me as a really great metaphorical vehicle for something infuriating difficult to express.

Specifically, the sheer levels of control that women are under such that compliance is survival and dissent unfathomable. There’s a parallel to women in insular Muslim majority communities here I am consistently unable to escape and it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Imagine that was actually your reality. That this is what life in the US has become. And your outward compliance to everything anti-woman restricting your mobility and freedom was paramount for your safety and survival.

Imagine the rest of the world started to look upon your community with distress and disapproval, and savior narratives began to take hold– and in response, those women in your community with the most visibility and status– not the handmaids nor the marthas, but the commander’s wives and aunt lydias–responded with furious indignation at the very idea that they were oppressed or needed saving or were doing anything but what they were driven to by their own values and social preferences and will and self-determination.

Imagine then that this was deemed sufficient to silence dissent from outsiders concerned, that charges of intolerance and slander towards your community were mounted on such bases should anyone persist in objecting to blatant normalized misogyny in your life. And that a sickening subversion of the concept of a victim– one who is stripped of voice, power, opportunity, agency by forces no human could hope to match– persists, making it seem like acknowledging that women like you are oppressed is tantamount to a cultural attack, tantamount acknowledging that women like you are weak, slow, lacking resource and wherewithal and agency and will. As If strong, brilliant, brave, resilient, creative people can’t ever be broken by violence and power. No, rather pretend it is a prejudiced unwarranted lie that women in your community are possibly systemically oppressed in horrific ways when the terrible truth is instead that they face insurmountable odds that the most gifted and resilient and tenacious of persons would be driven to silence and conformity under out of sheer self-preservation.

Meanwhile, to use Offred’s words, the “pious little shits” of your community may freely rail against the mere suggestion that women where you are suffer inequity, and there is little outward capacity to differentiate the genuinely adherent “pious little shits” from you yourself, as outwardly your situation is the same and must appear so.

And so even attempts from outsiders to recognize and demand redress for your plight is subverted. And the progressives of the world stand by and enable your oppression and treat its very suggestion as vile xenophobic myth, in the name of anti-interventionism and the sanctity of self-determination.

Just imagine you, American women (assuming main audience here is function of proximity forgive me if this is not you), lived in the world of the handmaids tale and the progressives of the world treated your position as some mythos *in the name of honoring your agency* while you were bound in silence without recourse. And further to that, took the symbols under which you were bound, say the bonnet and red cloak, and defended free adherence to them with a fierce kind of devotion, and began to incorporate their representation in unilaterally positive ways into their feminist discourse without ever acknowledging their source and meaning and function as they are actually manifested to you and most handmaids who are not “pious little shits” happy in their succor.

Can you imagine how fucked up that would be, how unmatched your helplessness and anger about it? And how doubly silenced it would render you?

Yeah. That’s how we feel. Just try to process that without exploding.