The much-anticipated new Hulu show, The Handmaid’s Tale, based on 1985 fiction by Margaret Atwood hit screens at an interesting time for audiences. Holding a significant spot in Amazon library waitlists for months before its air date, the shows anticipation partly stemmed from the books dystopian nature and lack of moral compass and partially from its relevance to our modern political landscape.

The series, even though set in the near future, looks as though it might be set in the 1800s, with the exception of the minimal use of a few modern-day technologies. A new totalitarian and Christian fundamentalist government is overthrown the US government amidst an ongoing civil war. Organized by a hierarchal militarized regime of biblical social and religious fantastic and new social classes where women are brutally subjugated, Gilead is a theocratic dictatorship. Women are denied basic civil rights, and by law are not allowed to work, own property, control money, or read. Widespread infertility due to a warfare contaminated environment has slowed birth rates to an alarming low and left few remaining women fertile. Considered a biblical precedent, these women, known as handmaids, are assigned to the households of the powerful and subjected to ritualized sex by their male master to bare children for his infertile mistress.

I would not consider myself a feminist and yet I found this show absolutely horrifying. We follow the story of Offered, a captive who is assigned as breeding stock to the family of the Commander after trying to cross the border with her family—her husband killed and daughter taken by the government. The name is assigned to her by her ‘commander’, and is identified as property of the family. If she disappoints, the fault falls on her shoulders, and she will be exiled to clean up radioactive waste with the other ‘unwomen’ until she dies or executed publicly and put on display.

Offered’s days are spent running errands such as going to the commissary and picking put food items in exchanges for tickets labeled with pictures—since women are not allowed to read—or sitting alone in a bedroom marked with shatterproof windows—so she can’t slit her wrists with a shard of the glass. On ‘ceremony nights’ she is to copulate with her ‘commander’ while lying in the lap of his wife.

The custom for women in this community involves enslavement, mutilation, and rape. This treatment tolerated by women since the luxury having a roof over your head and food to eat is the better than the alternative—hung by the government and put on display. In the first episode, we see Offered and another handmaid passing by the hooded bodies of a priest, a doctor, and a gay man. All of which were hung for their sins and made into an example for all those passing by.

The story is not newly relevant, at least not in the past thirty years, but has recently gotten even more so—since it is one step forward and two steps back with our presidential saint, Donald Trump. This story voices some powerful concerns that become more powerful each day our Mr. Trump takes residence in the White House. Let’s review—So far, we know Trump talks about women like they are chew toys, called out a tough journalist for being on her period, and whose administration gathered a room full of male politicians to discuss women’s health coverage. But even more frightening than his general treatment towards women is his campaign promises threatening women’s reproductive rights that he is determined to fill. In pursuit of reigning back the sexual revolution and return to traditional values, the overturn of famous supreme court case Roe vs. Wade—whose verdict gave women the right to an abortion—is a huge step backward for women by taking away the freedom we have over our own bodies.

The rollback of birth control is also a major fear for women during the Trump presidency. Not only would we not be in control of choices for our own bodies, we also would not be able to prevent the situations leading up to those choices. As President Trump has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which covers all FDA approved methods of birth control, with no plan to replace it, no one knows what will happen as far as access to contraceptives.

Just last month, women are threatening to take President Trump to court after a leaked draft proposal allowing employers to opt out of providing no cost birth control for religious and moral reasons. Alina Salganicoff, a women’s health policy expert at Kaiser Foundation, states, “The major thing that is does is broaden the exemption that in the past was only available to houses of worship”. 

Setting aside the high cost of childbirth, contraceptives provide indirect benefits to employers by taking much of the unpredictability out of requests for maternal leave. As women have become an integral part of the workforce, such a law would likely produce economic drawbacks. It is a step in the direction of taking women out of the workforce, with cause or rational for direct public benefit. So why? To put women in their ‘rightful’ place? Our president is feeding the eco of religious conservatives and blurring the meaning of separation of church and state, a phrase first drafted by Thomas Jefferson and a fundamental part of the First Amendment of our constitution.

I’m about to add more fuel to the fire. Birth rates in America are at a historic all-time low. Seeing any trends?

The Handmaids Tale is a chilling example of what can happen when power falls into the hands—however small—of those who are unfit to wield it. It should be our concern to see these frightening parallels between a dystopian future characterized by a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship and between our very own president. It is worth noting what can become of the most powerful man in America and of one of the most powerful men in the world—especially when filling a cabinet with radicals who support the same. It took 240 years to create America and may only take 4 years to destroy it.

I encourage you, guy and girl, and watch this show. See the horrors maybe a not so far-out future. I do not consider myself a feminist but, who knows, the depictions in this show may just be capable for making me one. The Handmaid’s Tale is not an instruction manual, sir, do not use it as so. The 2017 Women’s March said it well, “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again”.

Make America great again? America was already great.

But thank you for anticipating the 2020 campaign slogan.