We Are Not Going to Become the World of The Handmaid's Tale
Here's why.
Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…
… and one of those ways to show you how one fight for the future was won years ago — and why it’s about to be won again.
I’ve been writing these past few weeks on why we’re not going to have another civil war in the United States any time soon, but before I leave the topic of futures we’re not going to have, I figure I better answer the question I get asked second-most-often these days: With Trump and the misogynistic Right seemingly unbeatable, will the United States soon become the horrifying future of The Handmaid’s Tale?
In case you don’t know the reference, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian future novel published in 1985 by Margaret Atwood that depicts a world so irradiated that all women are left barren except for a few. And the America of that future is run by Christian fundamentalist fascists who systematically subjugate American women into castes of varying degrees of female slavery — the last fertile few as “handmaids”: broodmares for a powerful elite of men. It’s an America of systematic sexual slavery and subjugation of women by Christian-fundamentalist-fascist-rapists.
(Like I’ve said before, dystopian novels and movies are warnings, not forecasts.)
(Want a better picture of what futures of American democracy might actually be? Here are my scenarios for now through 2040. Want scenarios for futures of women worldwide? I continue to love Nancy Ramsey’s and Pamela McCorduck’s Futures of Women though there’s almost certainly more recent scenario sets that are as good.)
Yes, an ersatz, partial Handmaid’s Tale world has happened and is happening now in Alabamastan and the other states where abortion became outlawed — or functionally outlawed — following the fall of Roe. And worse for women may be on the way in some of those states. And we need to claw those states back to rescue those women from those laws and from those men. Right now.
Yes, I fear for my daughter and my wife and my sister and my mother because yes, the GOP will continue to rob women of their rights — one right at a time as long as they can — so we might get a Sabotage and Counter-Sabotage future until the GOP of today is decisively defeated, politically self-immolates the rest of the way, or both. And it’s entirely and extremely possible that that defeat is well under way right now if Democrats’ overperformance in every special election since Roe fell is any indication.
But as a futurist I’m taking a full nationwide The Handmaid’s Tale future off the table — if only for my own forecasts — for three reasons… or three hunches.
First, American women are pissed.
This isn’t the days of yore. This isn’t the Bad Old Days we grew up in. This isn’t even the world of only a handful of years ago. In this day if some fundamentalist-fascist-rapist thinks he’s gonna roll up on some American woman and fundamentalist-fascist-rape her — and/or set up a system of sexual slavery and rape — that American woman and every American woman nearby is going to punch him in the dick.
And recent studies have shown that fundamentalist-fascist-rapists are dissuaded from their rapism following 1-3 punches to the dick.
Second, while there’s moral-crusading energy on the Right behind outlawing abortion, there ain’t that kind of fire behind the rest of their fundamentalist-fascist-misogyny. To remind us all: it took the GOP all-pistons-firing-trillions-of-dollars-and-one-enormous-political-and-judicial-appointment-strategy-in-concert-with-one-of-its-largest-propaganda-efforts-in-its-history to overturn Roe and it still took them fifty years to succeed. And they don’t have anything like that in train as a follow-up. And progressive women have long since captured the high ground on most everything else — they’ve even convinced most Republican women — and nobody will give up ground.
The burgeoning conservative effort — stealth effort or not — to outlaw or stunt women’s access to birth control I suspect will be a nonstarter, especially after anyone who steps forward with a proposal to do so gets punched in the dick. Not even many Republican women will stand for that in this day and age.
What I mean is that in order to get from today (which is very bad) allllllllllllll the way over into the nationwide systematic subjugation and/or sexual slavery of American women of The Handmaid’s Tale there’s gotta be a whole lotta steps in between that just ain’t gonna happen.
Seriously, imagine that somewhere some State Senator Thaddeus P. What’s-His-Butt (“Poot” to his family) sits down to Sunday dinner with Mama Butt — Raven Maven of the GOP of Faulkner, Welty, and Percy Counties — and Grandma Butt, and he says, thinking they’ll be proud of him, Mama and Grandma, I just put a bill onto the floor of the state house saying that women SHOULD be paid less than men. After two good seconds of pause, Mama Butt’s gonna look at him and say Poot… no. And Grandma is gonna reach over with her spoon, scrape her potato salad offa his plate onto the floor, and she’s gonna call the dog. And then a few months later he’s gonna get punched in the electoral dick by a margin of 10,000-30,000. And recent studies have shown that fundamentalist-fascists lose elections badly following 10,000-30,000 punches to the electoral dick.
Third, American women have fundamentalist-fascist-aspiring-rapists outnumbered. Exponentially outnumbered.
Sometimes I’m a fan of historical hypotheticals. What if Adolf Hitler hadn’t been born? What if al-Qaeda had failed on 9/11? What if Red Lobster hadn’t offered unlimited shrimp? Here’s one:
What if the Capitol Rioters of January 6, 2021 had met the Women’s March of January 21, 2017 on the field of battle — the National Mall?
While the Capitol Riot is in more recent memory, the Women’s March is a bit further back. If you recall, the day after Trump was inaugurated American women — knowing who he is, was, and would be — turned to protest on the Mall and planned to march in front of the White House to register their dissent.
But the “march” part failed. Because so many women showed up that the organizers sent out a blast text saying There’s too many of us to move. Stand where you are and SPEAK THE TRUTH.
How many did Trump muster on January 6 and how many was he able to send to riot at the Capitol — at the height of his powers and at the height of their anger? Maybe 1,000-2,000.
How many women showed up for the Women’s March when Trump’s power wasn’t a mere single day old? 200,000. In DC alone. And many, many, many more worldwide.
And that was before Roe fell. And before kids in cages. And before George Floyd. And before alllllll the rest.
So.
If a thousand or two fundamentalist-fascist-aspiring-rapists ever advanced on the Capitol to try to take it on a cold day in hell they’re gonna find 200,000 American women in their way. Women so livid they’ve fallen silent.
Those thousand or two fundamentalist-fascist-aspiring-rapists will freeze in their tracks out of fear that American women will tear them limb-from-limb-from-limb-from-limb-until-they’re-in-bloody-pieces out of revenge for every-awful-thing-any-man-ever-did-to-a-woman-everywhere-and-anywhen-ever-in-the-history-of-humanity as a warning to every man going forward forevermore.
But American women won’t do that because they are not MAGA men.
No, they’re gonna say We will use that building — the Capitol — to do good. And you can’t have it.
And then the ghost of Susan B. Anthony will step out of the Smithsonian and call Saint Patrick down from heaven and he will lead all the snakes out of Ireland via the 14th Street bridge into Virginia (where the women are more armed and less civil).
Here’s the thing:
Fundamentalist-fascist-aspiring-rapists connive politically and judicially because they know they are so badly outnumbered that conniving is the only way they have left to win. Because they know they otherwise lost a long time ago.
I know it doesn’t look like it right now and instead it looks like we’re in the valley of the shadow of death. But that’s because almost nobody has been noticing the Democratic victories in special elections enough yet and because November hasn’t gotten here yet. Which means that The Great Thunder Punch to the GOP’s Electoral Dick has already been thrown but hasn’t landed yet.
Once it does, there will be no Handmaid’s Tale.
Paul invokes Turkish women. I'd add Iranian and Afghani women to that. We've got some powerful examples of countries that successfully turned back the clock on women's rights and made it stick. Which suggests that women's rights seem inevitable until the day they no longer are.
OTOH, they tried it in Poland, too, and the Polish women handed them their asses. And it's too early to tell what'll happen in South Korea, but the women there are on a nationwide Lysistrata-style sex strike that the men are responding to by electing increasingly authoritarian leaders. (The guys' theory of change here seems dubious at best, but it's what they're going with.) It's a standoff that's brought the entire nation to a demographic standstill, and nobody knows right now how that will end.
The sticky point in the system you describe is this: Male politicians have always (and often, tragically) underestimated women as political actors -- and this trait is apparently resistant to any known solvent. I can't go a week, even now, without seeing some political dude pontificating about how Dobbs doesn't matter, because it's just about the girls, and girls' social job is to forgive and forget, which they probably already have, and who cares about their little votes anyhow? Our rage over this is completely invisible to a certain kind of Beltway insider -- and these dudes thrive in both parties. This is why that stunning record of post-Dobbs electoral drubbings to date isn't taken seriously as a factor by Very Serious Men. It's all one-offs, so surprising, won't happen again. And when it does happen again, that time is a one-off, too, because they've already forgotten the last one.
Even when they're doubled over, clutching their punched dicks and wondering where all those winged harpies came from, the lesson persistently does not stick. It happens over and over: two weeks later, they have forgotten this humiliation entirely, and are back to underestimating us, because they are congenitally incapable of seeing women as people or learning from even repeated electoral catastrophes when women are involved. (The Hollywood parallel is that movies made by and for women don't get funded or made, even when they consistently over decades make more money than anything else. Those guys have the same blind spot.) They do not hear us, no matter how loudly we scream. They can't remember events involving us long enough to notice that there might be a pattern here. And until they grow the cognitive capacity to hear us and remember us, their behavior will not change.
We may do better when the good women of Texas, Idaho, Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama -- the states where this nonsense has taken deepest root -- step up and vote out the state GOP guys who are driving this insanity both locally and nationally. They will have to do it repeatedly, for a decade or more (likely, until a new generation of politicians rises up that came of age in the new reality) for the lesson to sink in. But it's probably the only way this insanity comes to a stable and permanent end.
Cass, hope you're right. I remember talking with a Turkish woman about 30 years ago---before Erdowan---and she was adamant they weren't going back. And yet they have. Not all the way to Handmaids tale, but they're certainly not where they were 30 years ago.