Are We All Handmaids?
So has anyone been watching The Handmaids Tale?! Season 2 just ended a few weeks ago and to be honest, it’s taken me this much time to even start to recover from the drama. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it (where have you been?!!), it’s a show on Hulu based on a book of the same name by Margaret Atwood. In a nasty little nutshell, it’s a future dystopian society called Gilliad, where women called “Handmaids” have one sole purpose: they’re forced to bear children for the all powerful patriarchs. Their bodies are basically sub-letted with complete disregard for their interest or desire to bare children at all, let alone to the men mounting them.
And it got me thinking…are we all allowing ourselves to become Handmaids? I mean, think about it: many of us are startled awake by an alarm set way too early, drag ourselves out of bed, trudge to work, and set about doing the tasks that apparently make us worthy of being a member of society. Many of us rent ourselves out for 40 hours. Every week. For YEARS, yall. Actually, according to an article by Business Insider, the average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime. Uh hello…Handmaid, much?
We do this to make money, to survive, to thrive, and in our society, it’s pretty mandatory. Cool. But don’t you want to be more than a job title? Don’t you want to use your body the way YOU want to use it? I’m down for popping out the metaphorical baby to make it in society, but I’m gonna go right ahead and plant the seed that maybe we should all take more days off. Go to the beach, dig our toes in the sand, let our bodies breathe. We’re more than what we produce for our community: the spreadsheets, the meetings, the “to and fro” of it all. You, just as you are, deserve a little love and self-care, Boo.
Meanwhile, poor Offred and her Handmade homegirls only get decent treatment when they’re pregnant. It’s a pat on the head for a job well done only when their body is being thoroughly borrowed by the community. (Gasp, Serena let her SEE the baby?! What a hero.) So, yeah. I’ll be front and center for the debauchery of Season 3 but I’ll be fresh from a day off, with maybe a little sand in my hair. Wanna come?