One of the many things I’ve learned whilst living overseas is this: Nobody cares about America as much Americans think they do. I truly believe the idea of American Exceptionalism is poisonous and the need to prove it is at the core of most of the country’s biggest problems. To say much more would be veering too much off topic, but I think Gilead had to be set in America because otherwise we wouldn’t find the horror in it. It had to hit close to home for us to see how fucked up it is.
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See, if The Handmaid’s Tale were set in Iran, people would read it and think, “So? They’re brown people, I mean, they’re savages, I mean… you know what I mean. This sort of thing happens there.” We think we’re better than the people in places where this happens, and it hasn’t sunk in that it could happen here as well.
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I want to note that this is an interesting phenomenon with genre fiction on TV more generally. The plan for American Gods seem to be that they plan to move past the book at some point, Game of Thrones already has and now there is a “spin-off” in the works for that, etc. From what I remember, the end of Handmaids Tale (the book) was sort of abrupt. I see no reason it can’t expand that universe through the show.
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You know what some of us see as a real live disaster? Turning back the clock on the rights of women to control our own bodies, which is what HMT is about at it’s heart. it’s a fundamental roll back of our rights. Yes, that’s a disaster.
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Yes, but it’s double speculative in this case:
- bad thing that could happen, must happen (climate change)
- end of all human life event that could happen, must happen (end of fertility)
It isn’t just what if, it’s
- What if somewhat probable thing happens, which we have data for
- And then really improbable and MUCH worse thing happens, which we have zero data for
They build on each other. Number two is so much worse than number one. It’s many orders of magnitude worse. Climate change is certainly bad, and things will need to change, but the end of all human life… is quite another matter altogether. And in the darkest possible manner. A meteor event would be merciful in comparison.
I can see plenty of climate change coming, since there are ample data trends to support that, but I can’t see the end of all human life event, since there’s zero fertility data trends to support it. At that point it might as well be “climate change, plus aliens land and enslave us”
Not saying it’s not interesting fiction, because it is, but “this could happen here!” argument is tenuous in the absence of literally any data that human fertility is at risk in any way whatsoever.
So?
Do you not understand the concept of speculative fiction, or do you just have an axe to grind?
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It’s the “it could happen here you guys! really!” part that bugs me. The fiction part is just fine.
The theatrical parts won’t happen and no one is worried about them.
The important parts happened before the book was written. The point of the book was to highlight injustices that had already occurred, and to point out that they can happen again.
Fertility crisis is not needed for women to loose rights or to be treated as property. That is happening now in a distributed way in many places including the US.
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It can happen, and a lot of it is happening, and it again it wouldn’t take a crazy apocalyptic doomsday scenario to make it happen. It would take something relatively mundane in comparison, even more mundane than climate change, as I and many others have pointed out. If you’re going to take issue with anything, take issue with this, don’t go fighting against strawman arguments that nobody is making.
I have never once said that worldwide infertility is something that probably would happen, and I certainly never said there’s a trend toward it. In fact:
…later in the same comment…
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Did you miss the part where Atwood pulled from events she was seeing at the time? Or do you think you understand her work better than she does?
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The whole Gilead thing didn’t start because there was a global evisceration of fertility. It started because women were whores, what with the wearing of makeup and high heels, choosing their sexual partners (who might be the same sex, or married, or a different race), and using their own money to buy coffee for themselves out in public. Women lost their jobs, money, etc. while the world around them still seemed relatively normal. They were made the scapegoats for the “God is angry with us, we must appease Him by going to back to a Biblical lifestyle” faction.
In fact, there are still healthy babies being born in the story, although not in the more toxic areas (which is TRUE TODAY IN THE U.S. AND OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD). What happens is that their living children are taken away from them and given to strangers, and then they are used as walking uteruses to provide more babies for only the right sort of higher-up families. (Surrogacy is already a huge market utilizing poor women in India, btw. The details in this story might be slightly more extreme, but they’re not far off the mark even right now.)
Meanwhile, Canada seems to be operating under normal parameters. More, even, because they are the first line of defense to help refugees from Gilead and they’re handling it quite well. They can do all the things for not only their own citizens but also refugees that Gilead can’t do without extreme violence and coercion. Feed them, clothe them, give them goods and services, and CHOICE.
The infertility issue is an excuse.
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The end of Handmaid’s Tale was open-ended. It was left to the reader to speculate as to the fate of Offred, whether she would reclaim her agency (in the book, things basically happened to her, especially at the end). Offred’s story ends pretty much the way the first season does.
Then you had an epilogue set , like, 200 years later revealing the fate of Gilead: academia has moved on, but doesn’t seem to have learnt much (that sour taste in your mouth? Probably what Atwood intended).
I think what we are seeing with SF TV is that it is very rare for a TV series to leave questions unanswered in the way that SF literature does. Even movies do that (e.g., Arrival answers a lot of questions that Story of Your Life doesn’t; the film adaptation of The Mist provides details on the fate of the party where the novella just putters off into the unknown). I believe Stephen King wrote that part of knowing how to write good fiction was knowing when to stop and let your readers’ imagination carry the story on themselves. Maybe that point is different for more visual media than it is for literature.
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Ahem…
I’ve read Atwood’s harrowing but excellent book, and seen the abysmal 90’s film version; but I cannot yet bring myself to watch this series for the same exact reason that I couldn’t watch Pursuit of Happyness when it first came out; the subject matter hits far too close to home for comfort.
I had just moved out the Bay area with my own young child, and our living circumstances were looking uncertain for a hot second there, so there was no way in hell that I could watch a film about a single parent who ends up homeless as any kind of entertainment.
In that same vein, I cannot watch the Handmaid’s Tale at this point in my journey.
Because as far fetched as it may seem to certain people of privilege, the premise of women in this country losing all agency as independent human beings isn’t as wildly implausible as some would like to think.
And it wouldn’t necessarily take a catastrophe of ‘extinction level event’ magnitude for that twisted excuse for a society to come into full fruition.
If nothing else, recent sociopolitical events show that all our laws, traditions and moral standards are pretty much meaningless if they are not upheld and enforced.
While it’s true that ‘nothing happens overnight,’ the attempts control and subjugate women and minorities have been going on for a long time, and images like this serve as a stark and sobering reminder that the truth is often stranger than fiction, and twice and as freakin’ scary:
Again, that’s weapons grade toxic masculinity at work there, and it’s a real, legitimate threat.
All that said, it would be nice if just once, we could have some meaningful dialog about this particular dire aspect of our reality without any tone deaf mansplaining going on, from anyone.
But that’s just too much like “right”; I guess.
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Most things that bug me are things that hit too close to home. It’s this darned log in my own eye.
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It’s the choice to ignore what’s “already happening here” that bugs me.
But you know what else that bugs? The choice to ignore everyone but @LearnedCoward in this thread. I wonder what’s different about him that makes him more worthy even though he’s agreeing with the women who have also replied to you.
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I can argue with you, too 
I guess in the spirit of “punching up”, I like to target the white male avatar when I can. My specific criticism isn’t of the show, or the book, but the claim “this could happen today!”
Of the events I’ve seen in the show, all of which are government sponsored …
- public stoning / murder justice
- systemic kidnapping and cult indoctrination
- genital mutilation “treatment” for homosexuality
- literal eye for an eye punishment
- machine gunning protesters with dozens of deaths
- freezing all assets of women
- cutting off a finger when a woman reads, or a hand if she keeps reading
- monthly religious rape ceremonies
I am curious which of those you view as plausible happening today, or even in the next decade, here in the United States? Because when I read
I am really not seeing anything in that bulleted list as “absolutely can happen here, and it is happening here?”
Outside of everyone can see the world is ending, which the extreme crash in fertility rates effectively would be, I have a hard time escalating any of that out of the 
s level of sci-fi plausibility.
Seriously? This is your excuse? How about listening to the women talking about their experiences as women instead of punching in the first place. Your unwillingness to acknowledge everything that is real in the story is rather revealing. As is your inability to let go of an argument the rest of us don’t want to have.
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The primary motivator in the story is the worldwide crash in fertility rate to near zero – this is an end of the world scenario, and as we saw in Children of Men, one that would quickly drive civilization – every nation – to the brink of this kind of pure madness.
It was my main reaction to the show. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble. I’ll leave the topic.
Ok, at this point I can only assume you haven’t read the book. I haven’t seen the series yet but from reviews I doubt it misses the mark that wide.
There is no world wide drop in fertility to near zero in the book and it is not a fertility crisis that starts the coup. It happens in parallel and is made worse by the war.
The book ends with a jump to future scholars talking about the rise and fall of white Western society.
The crisis in fertility is not the driver in the book, it is thrown in as a multiplier. It exaggerates the religious regime, it does not cause it.
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