AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

What has changed since now and the summer when I was eighteen?

What had changed between the summer when I was twenty-five and the summer when I was eighteen?

The summer when I was eighteen, I read "The Handmaid’s Tale" by Margaret Atwood in about a week. I picked it up again at twenty-five, almost seven years later.

I couldn’t read it. It scared me. It depressed me. I chalked it up to my close friend’s recent suicide— the woman in "The Handmaid's Tale" was trapped, and so was I, in my grief that I could not, almost did not feel allowed to, express.

Reading it now, I have the same reaction to it. But now I know it has nothing to do with my friend.

Could it be that it’s because now I’m really a woman? Now I’m really a woman, and I know— it could happen? Atwood picked up on all the signs of the times that are so much more prevalent now than they were when she wrote it: the Christian Right, the rapes blamed on women dressing immodestly, the women in Iraq in what I think are called burquas, covered head to toe in black shrouds, with only a slit for the eyes, people bemoaning women not marrying until they are almost too old to bear children, even those billboards you see that say “Not me, not now” and show a teenage girl who is proudly waiting until marriage to have sex. She picked up on all the signs of our times, however long ago she wrote it, and masterfully welded them into a dystopia that results from trying to solve the problem. And the dystopia is a dystopia of control. Control of women.

Women can’t hold pens. Women can’t hold cigarettes. Women can’t hold a tube of lipstick. Condoms are heresy. More than that— they are a sin, blasphemy. So are cigarettes, pens, and lipstick— for the handmaids. “Pens are envy,” the handmaids are told. It is very disturbing, and Atwood makes it all very real.

Could this happen? Is this already happening, or starting to? Those are the questions that make it hard for me to read more than two pages at a time. Because I’m afraid. Afraid for myself. Afraid for women. The fear is irrational. I know I’m being irrational. But through Atwood’s words, it seems that real, that likely.