The Handmaid’s Tale For Abuse Alchemy

* I have not read the books and have watched through season 2 as of writing this.

They do a good job representing the hot-and-cold dynamics and many angles of the emotional experience of abuse in a way that makes it bigger so you can see it.

They also weave hope and comradeship and holding to the path, like it is not existential, there is still good in the world, and there is a way out.

There is so much I think would hit on something for most people and you have to wonder what is the appeal for a show based on something so fucked up and hard to watch. Besides inspiring hope and being genuinely illuminating about abuse, it also elicits an emotional intrigue like Existential Kink.

Basically everyone has a history of abuse in their life, and to some degree/ in certain ways currently still. People don’t know they are being abused until they know they are being abused, one dynamic at a time.

But also, in this desire based universe, abuse exists because we want the experience of… powerlessness? being overpowered? etc. We may be readily inclined to feel righteous about the abuse done to us, filled with anger and will to say no. Of course that is reasonable. There is always right and wrong and wrongs require remedy. When remedy is denied or until it is given AND the dynamic persists in our life, there is another part of us enjoying the experience in some way, getting something out of it.

–> Existential Kink would make the distinction that we do not explicitly enjoy the abuse in itself, but rather that it creates a desirable (or desirable to us) emotional experience.

The Handmaid’s Tale lets you into the drama of abuse where you might otherwise resist it. The insanity gets enmeshed with a story that you keep coming back for and suddenly you can’t separate your reason for watching. It’s kind of ironic because the fandom seems to make it a symbol for righteous defiance or in the realm of social justice. But I think the ultimate gift and reason the show can be so alchemizing is due to the personal and experiential nature. It’s an EK experience if you let it be.

Here is a watchlist of many nuances of abuse depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale:

A note:

The structure of Gilead was imposed upon adults who had a normal life before, so being dropped into the new society was quite a contrast from what they already knew and therefore they essentially all know it for abuse. Of course there is the boil-the-frog-slowly aspect of the signs that came before and the subtle patterns of abuse that exist in basically everyone’s life either way that would have been a primer for Gilead in the first place.

Consider the children that grow up in Gilead. Children enmesh with their caregivers in order to survive. The abuse is all they know and therefore it does not feel like abuse to them. That is essentially childhood in real life to one degree or another and we remain with various enmeshments into adulthood until or if we can see it against some other contrast.

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EDIT: A note about the book now having read it

It is interesting to have gone to the show first and then read the book to find myself observing rather than experiencing the flavor of how the book is experiential in its own way. It is more gentle, less intense (perhaps in part due to the nature of being a book) and you have more space to take your pace emotionally. You are in control that you have to read the words on the page vs being subject to what unfolds on the screen. I wonder what it would have been like to read the book first.

The book to me has a different emotional undercurrent than the show, while both seem to make a social statement in the realm of “women’s empowerment.” The way the book ended had a casual air of “we learned nothing” “nothing has changed” in the regard towards women culturally. The bulk of the book is a first person telling/ capsule account of the experience of being a handmaid, and then the closing chapter is a 100 years later post Gilead, a man’s speech at a conference about Gilead. Both the way of the speech and the audience’s reaction, then together with the rest of the book left me with a sad feeling.

I don’t buy the “women are oppressed” narratives of real life today or the mindset that some women have to identify with “woe to be a woman.” I don’t think it is at all productive to victimize yourself on the basis of being a woman. Though it is interesting to me the regard women have for themselves, the lean towards smallness. The role of men in this is interesting too, though of course as an adult woman you cannot make your woes the fault of men (genuine right and wrong aside). Women are born already whole and thus it be the responsibility of women to express our wholeness in the world.

And then it still comes back to your (everyone’s) relationship with abuse. The micro to macro abuses we all enact onto each other and the enmeshment patterns we maintain from childhood.

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A prayer,

Jeanne-Marie