Through the Flaming Sword

I’ve been watching The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s frightening how contemporary it is, how it corresponds to our time and reality more than it did when the book was released in 1985, and even more than when the show began in 2017.

Of course, we do not need a television program to show us what man’s dominion over women’s bodies looks like, or patriarchy’s control of female and human reproduction, or what state-sponsored sexual slavery looks like, when a woman can be forced to have sex with a man through brute personal force and then be forced to carry and give birth to his child through the force of the state.

All in the name of God, of course. For where else could men turn for an authority undeniable enough and yet pliable enough to not simply justify but actually sanctify such violence? 

And not just control over whom you have sex with and have children with, but even why. Why? Our patriarchal sex-slavers do not have the excuse in Margaret Atwood’s story of a global collapse in human fertility. Our Commanders need no more than their own engorged will to power. Nietzsche would be proud, if these people were not such under-men. 

These untermenschen do have their wet-dreams of a theocracy, however, just like Atwood’s Commanders, and also the same hypocrisies. At least they do in Florida.

I suppose such language is not Quakerly, not loving. Mea culpa. I do believe in the testimony of love; I do. But sometimes I feel more like Amos. Let justice roll down.