Incensed Rant re: The Handmaid's Tale

It's probably not much of a spoiler at this point to reveal that the Handmaid's Tale, which I've finally gotten around to watching (first two seasons; all I can take), is a dystopic tale of a world where the birth rate is plunging, and the few remaining fertile women ("handmaids") are divvied up among ruling class households, to be impregnated so their babies can be claimed as the families' own while the handmaids are shuttled off for more breeding elsewhere.

Because the allegory must be pounded and tamped and flogged and flayed to death, to afterlife, and to the ultimate heat death of the universe, there's more!

The handmaids are shocked with cattle prods, mutilated, and followed everywhere by a seemingly infinite supply of beefy armed goons. And then, within that overarching setup, really sucky stuff happens. Because a proper dystopia, as we all know, means zero light and zero happiness.

Periodically, a crowd of handmaids is assembled to punish some random faceless male offender. For a few minutes, they're urged to kick and punch and stone the poor shlub to death. In this world, it makes sense to offer the captive women some release for their anger, so they're not constantly burning down their oppressor's houses or slashing sleeping throats.

But these bloody scenes of aggression are played brightly. Our protagonist, amid the crowd, screams and rages and kicks and claws at the total stranger, and she's shot not as a monster but as a heroine enjoying a rare moment of release and liberation. It's nearly triumphant. You go, girl!

Talk online among fans and critics confirms this take. It's considered understandable that people so mistreated by men would (and even should) be game for kicking in the heads of random males. Hey, these women don't make the rules. Can't you see what they're going through???

That's a crux, right there, not just for the show but for a certain swathe of society - extremists of both the left and the right. Victims are justified in committing violence. Not just targeted violence against their oppressors, but against anyone outside their victim class. It's all the more justified if your target shares some characteristic (e.g. a penis) with your oppressors. This explains why people spend such energy staking out their victimization bona fides.

As a kindness, they'll even do so for others. I once had a hellish date with a woman who turned out to be a Marxist radical, and she went on a spectacular rant of hot rage about white males until I calmly reminded her that I, myself, am a white male. She dried the spittle from her chin, composed herself, and replied, in a honeyed, tender tone, "Oh, you're not white, Jim! You're JEWISH!"

Odd, as we'd never discussed my background. But, anyhoo....sure enough, I suddenly felt properly victimized, a state that had been bestowed on me like a benediction. First of all, I felt degraded by having an identity imposed on me. I'm not a beetle or a butterfly. I'm not fair game for your categorization. I couldn't help imagining my date sewing a yellow Jewish star on my lapel to let her movement's enforcers know I'm to receive special dispensation in the Great Cleansing.

Beyond the degradation, I wasn't looking for a ticket to whine. Or to kick heads. As a newly-minted "person of color", I was still ok with white people, despite their bland cooking. Some do shitty things, but it's not because they're white people, it's because they're people, and people do shitty things (Racism, sexism, classism, etc. are nothing more than the incomplete registration of a perfectly appropriate misanthropy.)

The victim trip, at its heart, reveals a visceral drive to claim license to kick heads in. Victimhood offers that as a Blagojevichian^* perq ("I've got this thing and it's fuckin' golden!").

^* - Antegooglewhackblatt scored, achievement unlocked.

And so while I'm physically sickened by Fox News and MAGAism and Rush Limbaugh (rest in grease) and the rest, I'm absolutely not a progressive. I'm for less head kicking. You want to lash out? Join a boxing gym. I reject both your honeyed benediction and your dopey righteous fury.

I don't want to kick, be kicked, or see others kicked in the head. Screaming about the ugly evil shittiness of white people or boomers or men or whatever strikes me as exactly the same impulse as screaming about the ugly evil shittiness of Jews or Hispanics or whatever. It's not ok ever. I'd like to see less screaming and kicking and hating, which means I'm neither liberal nor conservative. If I must pick sides, call me a Rodney Kingian ("Can we all get along? Can we stop making it horrible?").



So to the producers and fans of The Handmaid's Tale, I say this: even if you're a mutilated, cattle-prodded sex-slave to rapey tyrants, it's still not ok to kick random strangers in the head. Mmkay? There's no victim class so outrage-provoking that randos wandering into the frame deserve to be kicked and clawed to death. People aren't symbols or cartoons. People are people. They're real, not abstracted representatives of victim classes or oppressor classes. Let's always frame people as indviduals, and refrain from hating or sparing them because of their arbitary, superficial taxonomical badges.


The other thing I noticed about the show is that in all flashbacks to our current day (pre-dystopia), everyone's so smiley! Smiles and laughter and heartfelt emotion! People connecting! Hey, friend, freedom's AWESOME!

People living in freedom, it seems, expand to inhabit every inch of their boundless freedom in every moment! Free people are happy, well-adjusted, loving people!

These flashback scenes leave me confused. Wait. Which are we again, exactly? Cuz, looking around, I don't see great big Freedom Smiles or heartfelt connection. I see dystopian faces, persecution complexes, and a false sensation of immense burden. Even though we're still free (as of 10:55 EST Monday morning).

So, again, which are we, exactly? I see, everywhere, the telltale gloomy blue/green dystopian tint, even in a society with relatively few mutilated, cattle-prodded sex-slaves held captive by rapey tyrants. So where, exactly, is Smileyland?

I'm being cute, of course. I know perfectly well that Smileyland is simply the opposite of the show's dystopia, which deliberately gathers together every possible trigger characteristic of the worst imaginable fate. It must be laid on thick to push every possible button. 100% of stories must be 100% awful 100% of the time (with infrequent respites for jubilantly thrashing random strangers). But even that is insufficient. The show could still seem un-staunch in its fervid, total, absolute, not-partial, not-ambiguous, mad, furious, outraged opposition to the particulars of this allegory if the dystopia weren't also contrasted with its antithesis.

Smileyland (the Before Times; i.e. our current day) is that antithetical Utopia, full of the emotional blossoming few show viewers actually aspire to, much less experience, because they're so busy angling for screechy victim entitlement to kick fucking heads in. That's what we do with our freedom.