* 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:
- Rape and overall slavery, ritualized as if it be your great honor to undergo for the greater good; “blessed be the fruit”
- Nothing is really yours or only so far as it is granted; claiming ownership or taking credit for something that is yours as if it were theirs; silly you for thinking anything is yours
- Hot-and-cold dynamics; “kindness” or “love” expressed insofar as you are the perfect image of what they want from you or enmeshed to their reality
- Discarding you once you are no longer of use to them; false love, false promises that to them are only a means to an end and you are easily rejected/ replaced
- The fact that the abuser in one dynamic is the abused in another dynamic
- Hence abusers don’t think they are doing anything wrong but believe what they do is righteous and good
- Because they are enmeshed with their own abusers and their own false stability depends on it
- Hoping the abuser can change; seeing true humanity in them and the heartbreak of their loyalty to their own enmeshment
- They always know better than you and know what is best for you and expect you to give over to that; you could never know what is right for your own self
- They think you are crazy or unwell if ever you express your own wholeness
- They are in control of the goodness you encounter, only as it is granted by them or by their permission
- The strategy and deliberate choices (or intuitive navigating) to play along vs not to protect yourself and shape the situation to gain some sense of having won
- The moral debate within yourself about how to win like you deserve while not yourself becoming an abuser and maintaining true heart
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.
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.
- When are the moments you give over to someone or something that actually does not feel good to you?
- Where do you override your no’s for the sake of what might feel like stability or goodness or love?
- What relationships/ dynamics in your life feel uncertain or on edge?
- What do you stand to lose from these relationships?
- Should trying to resolve be unfruitful, can you live with that loss or trust it’s available elsewhere in a healthy way?
- Who would you be on the other side of heartbreak? the heartbreak of what you stand to lose and the heartbreak of who you were to allow it as long as you did.
- What are the ways YOU do wrong to others? How do YOU enact abuse onto others?
- What do you stand to lose if you make right by it? What do you gain by the wrongs you do to others?
- What would it be like in a world where responsibility be expressed where it belongs and people give a fuck about honor?
A prayer,
Jeanne-Marie