Headscratchers / The Handmaid's Tale

Why bring back the oppression of women?

• Why did the people running this society think it would be in their best interest to bring back the oppression of women?
  If this took place in an alternate history, where women's status never changed and they never gained any more rights than they had centuries ago (and still do in many non-first world countries), the premise could make sense. But it takes place in a North America that used to be just like our world's, where the protagonist went to college and had a husband and child and lived with the same rights and freedoms North American women have now. Then that changed, and a new tyrannical regime took over that set all kinds of new restrictions, on men, as well, but mostly on women. Does the novel ever explain, why? What led people to the conclusion that these changes would serve any purpose? For that matter, what purpose are they supposed to serve? Even if it was a selfish purpose, like ensuring wealth and power for a select few, or an illogical purpose that a second look would show these methods would never accomplish, is one provided? For example, due to declining birth rates caused by radiation poisoning, the society wants more babies to be born. Well, they have access to the same scientific knowledge our society does that shows that men can be sterile as well as women, so why would they decide it was in their best interest to deny all those scientific facts and instead re-adopt the debunked superstition that only women can be infertile and that it's always and only the woman's fault if she can't conceive? Adopting and enforcing this superstition as fact only sabotages their efforts to produce more healthy babies. Yes, that's the point — the novel's demonstrating that oppression of women hurts society — but why would a society adopt rules that only hurt its goals? The rules imposed by the societies of Brave New World and 1984 are unjust, but they serve the purpose of the regimes imposing them (the problem is that either that purpose itself is horrible, or the methods used to reach it have a huge price tag). Here, it seems the rules of this dystopian regime don't serve any purpose at all (unless the rulers just hate women and want them to suffer no matter what the cost to society?). What's the motive?
  • Fucking. YES. THIS is exactly why The Handmaid's Tale is bad Science Fiction. The power dynamics don't make sense at all. In a world where few women are fertile and capable of the continuation of the entire species, there is NO WAY they would become second class citizens. They would get to pick and choose who they'd choose as their mates, and anyone close to the handmaids would become the upper class by virtue of having access to the only way to continuing their genes. Has anyone here read Y: The Last Man? A freak accident kills all the males of every species on earth, leaving one guy alive. He instantly becomes a celebrity, because he's the only way anyone can have sex/children anymore. Handmaid's Tale doesn't make any sense, if you think about it for more than two minutes.
    • Except that in Y: The Last Man, Yorick becomes "a celebrity" in that he becomes famous, but he doesn't become ruler of the planet. He becomes a target. He spends the entire series running away from people who are trying to gain control over him, including a fanatical cult that want to kill him. He spends the rest of his life as the subject of medical experiments under intense surveillance to the point that he's institutionalized for making a joke that his handlers thought might have a suicide threat.
    • The Handmaids aren't chosen because they are infertile and then put into slavery. They are sentenced as moral degenerates, lesbians, women who marry divorce men and single mothers. Most moral degenerates are killed but the Handmaids are fertile and do the equivalent of 'pleading their belly' to get slavery instead of death.
    • Not necessarily the case. Serfdom and the like often arose to prevent people from exerting their power when there was a shortage. Russian serfdom developed when opportunities to go east to the frontier opened up, creating a labor shortage. Allegedly. Also, in Japan through The '80s and possibly beyond, when university graduates from the top schools were in high demand, companies did dirty tricks to take and bind workers to them. Consider A Brother's Price, in which a severe male shortage made them valuable property or serfs.
    • Because the Bible says so. Or at least a bad interpretation of the Bible. Also, the thought of a few women having that much power might have given the rulers the bejeebers.
  • There are lots of societies that do things that hurt them. Also consider that in times of fear and chaos, many people turn to extremism is one form or another. And then, consider that there are lots of people who believe the values of the Republic. It could be a matter of a minority gaining power and exerting it over an unwilling majority. That does happen. It's possible that many supporters of the movement were of the type that says "Well, I don't agree with everything they say, but I support them because of X reasons". There's a good chance that the leaders gained power that way (for example, many low income people who rely on social assistance programs will still vote for politicians who disagree with those programs, because they might agree with their stance on abortion or gay marriage). Serena is a clear example of a woman benefiting from equal rights while arguing against them. The book establishes that the Republic of Gilead wasn't stable and didn't last very long.
  • Also, there are plenty of instances throughout history where people who previously had rights lost them later. It's not unfeasible. Some of the Middle Eastern countries that have oppressive laws toward women were actually more progressive decades ago. It's possible to regress.
  • It's not their best interest, fine, but they believed it to be God's best interest.
    • Why? How did this movement start in-universe? A nuclear war?
    • Probably after the birth rates dropped due to radiation and STDs. That could cause people to do things they wouldn't otherwise, in fear of going extinct.
    • Hillary got in in the 2016 election. Most of the alt-right broke up, what was left got even more right-wing and developed into the 'Sons of Jacob'. June and Moira's 'college' scenes are the summer of 2017 where everyone who would have been marching and protesting is in fact chilling out and partying in their bubble of happy smugness. For a similar real-world example, see the 'cool britannia' period at the end of the 90s after the conservatives were booted out of the UK parliament, followed by the rise of UKIP, Farage, the BNP...
  • Keep in mind that there are some devout Christians (and other religious people) that tend to be very skeptical towards science and see it as contradictory to their faith.
    • Not actually true, that's just when they apologized over it.
    • You don't even have to go that far back in history - you can turn to many contemporary examples. For example, there are many fundamentalist Christians who deny the scientific consensus of evolution because it doesn't comport with the Biblical story of creation by God. Many, many members of religious faiths (including fundamentalist Christians) also continue to support abstinence-only sexuality education despite the abundance of data that it does not work, and continue to assert that abortion causes depression and raises breast cancer risk when these have been roundly debunked as well. It's not even isolated to religious faith; there are giant swaths of people in many developing nations who believe HIV/AIDS can be cured by having sex with a virgin or that gay people don't exist in their country. Most societies in history have rejected some form or version of science in favor of whatever is more convenient or comfortable for them to believe. That's nothing new.
  • The book was written in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution; where Iran went from a secular government affording women nearly equal rights to one of extreme religious fundamentalism. A point of the book is to point out that the US of the 80s wasn't so different to Iran of the 70s. And once you've fallen to religious fundamentalism, all the logic and science in the world can't change the beliefs of the people in charge. In fact, you can see *many* of the same behaviors and beliefs in fundamentalist theocracies today. The book was written around the time of Ronald Reagan's growing popularity during the 1980s where women's rights and feminism ended up in the backseat due to the rise of the "New Right" and "Moral Majority" due to Reagan's charisma that made conservative Christianity mainstream and made American society more hostile towards feminism and women's rights. The book highlights the horrors and evils of religious fundamentalism where it goes too far and abandon the secular principles for a more totalitarian theocracy (in both Muslim AND Christian circles).
    • If that was Atwood's inspiration, why did she use Christian fundamentalism instead of Islamic fundamentalism or instead of making up a religion that combines multiple ones like in Brave New World?
    • Because it was about North America, where she is from.
    • It's also something of a Call-Back to historical New England. The theocratic laws, medieval punishments, and treatment of women in Puritan New England were damn close to the same laws and punishments shown in Gilead, right down to the stoning, hangings, enforced dress codes, and bans on women reading. See New England Puritan. The Deep South of the USA is also deeply religious and patriarchal.
    • But transcript evidence shows near-universal female literacy in New England by 1790, and there are many writings specifically created by Puritan women about their religion. There were no arranged marriages in Puritan New England, either - the women chose whether to marry any given suitor.
    • I mean, Iran of the 70s was extremely poor and the only "secular" majority was of the rich 1% who lived in the cities at the time. A better comparison would be the Taliban, which affected far bigger economical and social hierarchies of Afghan Society. Also, parallels between Islamic Fundamentalism (In lieu of Iran) and Christian Fundamentalism are too different, because in Iranian society they do allow women to vote and get an education. Which means that If Atwood did her homework, she would probably base her book directly off of the Christian Fundamentalist movement. Then again, OP makes sense in his analysis that a return to fundamentalism as portrayed in the book would either require a full regression of values due to anarchy or... a full return to puritanical values.
  • The book is also based directly on the US's Christian fundamentalist movement. As in, things that evangelical churches have literally advocated as public policy, and everything that's exaggerated based on the same bible passages favored by Dominionist and Evangelical Protestant churches. Many of the nastier passages are direct quotes... and not all from obscure sects, either, the primary source of idea-mining is the Southern Baptist Council. Gilead is pretty much the state that the SBC has openly professed to wanting, but with all of the ramifications explored semi-realistically instead of taking their claims of how they'd end up at face value. So while I don't have the "why would they want to do that" answer for you... the largest Christian denomination in the United States has in fact wanted to do it for at least half a century now, whatever the reason is.

Why mock Janine for suffering through childbirth?

• Offred mentally chastises Janine for making a big deal about the pain of giving birth, saying to herself "She's given birth before - she must remember how much it hurts." But she also notes that "They don't believe in pain relief" for childbirth - so why doesn't it cross Offred's mind that perhaps Janine received pain relief during the birth of her first child, and that this is the reason for Janine seeming to be unprepared for the pain of birthing her second child?
  • Janine is sort of Offred's mental scapegoat, because Offred sees the girl as weak and a kiss-up. It's not nice or sympathetic of her, but she thinks Janine might be trying to gain extra sympathy, and she's a little envious that Janine has carried her baby to term so she's mad at her.
  • It's part of the subtle brainwashing that the women are made to hate each other so that they don't retaliate against the men. To June, having to attend her birth is no different than having to hang out with the bitchy popular girl because your mom made you.
• Offred mentions that only the Wives are 'allowed' to get sick; the Marthas must avoid being seen to be past their prime lest they be forcibly 'retired' and the Handmaids must avoid being reported for infertility lest they be declared Unwomen. Offred remembers when one of Serena's Marthas caught the flu and, rather than taking bed-rest as a Wife would, continued performing her duties as well as she could. When Serena saw her collapsing from one pillar to the next and questioned her, the Martha blamed it on a 'slight cold'. Wouldn't being reduced to fainting onto pillars by a slight cold be more indicative of overall bad health of the sort that would get one retired than being affected that way by the flu? And fertile women can catch the flu just as much as infertile women, and both will recover perfectly well with a week's rest, so why the need for a Handmaid to disguise the symptoms of her flu lest she be reported for infertility?
  • Probably because a Handmaid is expected to be healthy, as her main purpose lies in her phisiology. Besides, most babies who are being born are implied to be sick in some ways, so it's likely that there are draconian measures in place to ensure that nothing about a Handmaid can affect a baby negatively, even things that from our perspective (or from a common sense perspective) would have no effect on her pregnancy.
  • It's also an example of the terror under which these characters live. They're all easily replaceable, and if they don't "earn" their place in the household, they will be sent to the Colonies or shot.
  • But if your goal is to make the limited number of fertile women produce as many babies as possible, what is the motive for reducing your pool of fertile women by discarding ones who get sick with something that does not affect their fertility? Such actions/policies make sense if your motive is to torture women even at the expense of reproduction (less babies is worth it to keep women in their place), but not if part of your motive for oppressing women is producing babies.
    • You're trying to make Gilead make sense. Gilead will make a lot more sense if you stop expecting it to make sense. If it made sense, it wouldn't be such an awful place. Countries have nonsensical policies all the time. In the book, Gilead was also racist, despite the fact that excluding women of colour from their system would only hurt their birth rate. Sometimes, and for various reasons, people's actions don't match their goals. Sometimes goals conflict with each other — one of Gilead's goals is to produce babies, but another of their goals is to oppress women, and sometimes these goals are mutually exclusive. For example, in the show, Fred refuses to let the best neonatologist in the country examine Charlotte, because she's a woman. This goes against Gilead's goal of producing and protecting babies, but it certainly lines up with their misogynist rules, which ban women from such careers. And of course, sometimes individuals have very different goals than the institutions they serve. Fred seems much less concerned with increasing Gilead's fertility than with following the rules about oppressing women and keeping wives obedient to their husbands. In many ways, Gilead does prefer to torture women even at the expense of reproduction, even if this isn't necessarily conscious or deliberate. As for the rules about Marthas and Handmaids not getting sick, Gilead isn't exactly known for its perfect adherence to sound medical ideas. This is not new, nor is it unique to Gilead; plenty of people and societies in real life follow superstitious, illogical practices that are detrimental to their actual goals. There's such a thing is being irrational or ignorant. These rules are irrational and ignorant. It's really as simple as that.
  • Propaganda makes people do nonsensical things. During the early Communist years in China, official stories went out about miraculous harvests where farmers had planted thousands of crops into tiny spaces, not giving them the room they needed to grow or enough nutrients in the soil. Real farmers, with generations of experience, heard about this and the officials in their regions accused them of not doing enough to produce more food: forcing farmers who knew better to strangle their crops by over-sowing seeds. The result? Famine, the exact opposite of what they were trying to achieve. A similar thing is going on in Gilead: miraculous claims that good citizens don't get sick, the idea that if you do, you must be doing something wrong, and never getting accurate information about it to the point where even someone who is an expert on the subject makes the wrong choice because the only evidence is that the thing is true, a good citizen can make this happen even if the goal is really impossible.

Why not pair Handmaids with young and virile men?

• The doctor who examines Offred mentions that it is more than possible that the guys the Handmaids are allotted to are sterile... or simply too old. Which they could very well be given only the highest echelon gets Handmaids, but is a serious Idiot Ball from the Gilead society. Seriously, if you want to propagate and even punish women for not conceiving, shouldn't you send them with the young and virile ones?
  • Partly out of pride and desire to control the rest of the population (look how many older male celebrities marry women much younger than themselves, and immediately impregnate them, so they can trot their new trophy wife/baby combo out in front of onlookers, and prove to them that their penis still works. Many middle-aged men even get on testosterone supplements, specifically for this reason). Combine that with the fact that older men are frequently a bit over-confident in their geriatric baby-making abilities (especially the ones who can’t afford testosterone supplements), if the number of 50+ men on dating apps claiming to want kids “someday, but not right now” is any indicator.
  • The Idiot Ball is to be expected of those rulers: they're not exactly intelligent, only murderous. Also, Heaven prohibit that the Handmaids actually enjoy the sex. Anything other than IKEA Erotica is antithetical to their sense of propriety.
  • But why? What purpose does this attitude serve? What event(s) transpired to make some people desire and adopt this attitude? Why does the government not only desire that fertile women shouldn't enjoy sex but decide it's in their best interest to ignore the fact that younger men are more fertile than older men? If they want babies to be born, what purpose does ignoring the knowledge their world has that older men are less fertile serve them? If they decided ensuring women don't enjoy sex is more important than babies being born, why go through the farce of assigning them to likely infertile men? The adult heroine was an adult before this society arose; it hasn't been around that long. Even if this society believes female oppression is more important than propagation, there's no point in wasting energy and resources putting women and older men in a set-up you know accomplishes nothing.
    • Ideology trumps facts for humans, almost all the time. (Consider how many people in real life say they want to reduce the number of abortions, but also oppose contraception and sex education.) The stated purpose of sex, in conservative Christianity's dogma, is for procreation inside marriage. To that end, any sex which isn't for procreation inside marriage is sinful. Gilead made an end-run around this to combat the plague of infertility with its warped interpretation of Genesis 30:4 — and to maintain the power of those who overthrew the previous government in the first place, obviously the coup leaders must be the ones who can propagate humanity. (Where this falls apart swiftly, beyond just the horrific situation of the Handmaids, is that it'll be very difficult to maintain the structure of serving Marthas given that A: they aren't having children to bring up in an oral tradition of how to cook and prepare food from scratch, and B: without the permission for the Marthas, or any woman, to write down or read recipes and cooking tips, the ruling caste will likely die of malnutrition eventually because they'll have no idea how to prepare food themselves.)
  • Don't expect ANYTHING in a fascist regime to make logical sense. Have you heard the argument that people only deserve health care if they're worthy, because they've "led a good life" (i.e. born rich and without any genetic "flaw" to make them sick)? This is a different side of the same coin. The ruling class, in this case rich white extreme right wing religious fundamentalists, believe that they are chosen by God to forge a new society based on things cherry-picked from the Bible. If God hasn't given them a baby yet, it's because there is something wrong (likely her sins) with the "vessel" in which they're putting their sacred seed, not because of the seed itself. So they'll keep trying different vessels until one makes a baby.
    • Yes - stereotypically folks in this group are not known for strong beliefs in science and medicine, either. Who knows what they believe - but it may not be that men grow less fertile as they get older. There are a lot of people who AREN'T religious fundamentalists who don't realize that.
  • Many fascist, communist, autocratic, probably even democratic regimes throughout history have created some kind of convoluted justification system for the way things are set up to lend some credence to it. In most regimes in which women are oppressed, some reason is invented or stated - that women need protection from male others; that women are incapable of rational thought; that it's to preserve women's health and safety; etc. In some cases, the ones in power may even believe their spiel; the 2017 television show seems to hint so far that some of the men may actually buy into pieces and parts of the structure, while others don't. But the reality is - many, perhaps even most, of the men with the most power are likely to be older and less fertile. There's no way in hell, however, they're going to deny *themselves* the opportunity to have power over a sexual slave in their own household.
  • The book focuses on a very narrow section of society, and the show only widens a little. The purpose of the Handmaids isn't to increase the whole population, but to provide children for the elite who aren't having their own. Regular families are having kids, the lack of abortion and contraceptives will boost the population as a whole (plus the fact that wives are meant to be at home and can't work will give many a reason to have a child they may have put off if they had a career). If the point was 'more babies' then any fertile woman would be encouraged (or forced) to have as many male partners as possible until she had as many babies as possible (maybe with some Lebensborn programmes popping up). No, the purpose of the Handmaids is just to provide the Commanders with children, or die trying to protect their egos.

The weird Handmaid uniform

• Why the weird handmaid uniform? This isn't an Alternate History. The world it takes place in already had a uniform designed to conceal a woman's body and reinforce her second-class citizen status — it's called a burqa. This world designing a different uniform for the same purpose that doesn't do the job as well seems like the equivalent of a society in a book (written in, say, 2000) set in the future of our own world having a wheeled horseless vehicle that runs on gasoline and the reader being expected to act as if this is some sign of how different this society is just because said vehicle isn't called a "car."
  • Just a guess, but a fundamentalist Christian regime probably would shy away from using a burqa or any clothing associated with Islam. Also, you're asking why a government founded on irrational beliefs would act irrationally by putting people in ridiculous costumes? It's really a question which answers itself. Moreover, this is Margaret Atwood's explanation for the uniforms: "The modesty costumes worn by the women of Gilead are derived from Western religious iconography — the Wives wear the blue of purity, from the Virgin Mary; the Handmaids wear red, from the blood of parturition, but also from Mary Magdalene. Also, red is easier to see if you happen to be fleeing. The wives of men lower in the social scale are called Econowives, and wear stripes. I must confess that the face-hiding bonnets came not only from mid-Victorian costume and from nuns, but from the Old Dutch◊ Cleanser package of the 1940s, which showed a woman with her face hidden, and which frightened me as a child. Many totalitarianisms have used clothing, both forbidden and enforced, to identify and control people — think of yellow stars and Roman purple — and many have ruled behind a religious front. It makes the creation of heretics that much easier."
  • Adding to what the above poster said: Atwood has noted that when she was writing the novel, she was thinking about sumptuary laws throughout history. Besides being Color-Coded for Your Convenience , the clothes serve a purpose in defining who belongs to what class. And, as noted above, it's easy to find the rule-breakers when everyone is forced into these narrow categories. As just one example, medieval prostitutes wore yellow.
  • Also, burqas are far from the only body-concealing uniform even in contemporary society by religious fundamentalist sects. The dresses and bonnets that female Old Order Mennonites and Amish ("plain dress") wear, for example, are actually VERY similar to the Handmaid's uniforms in the 2017 television series (and thus the ones described in the book). Some Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewish women dress very conservatively. Women in fundamentalist Christian cults often wear dresses similar to those seen in the television series, as well. Think also of traditional nuns' habits, which many orders of nuns still wear today. You don't have to go to the Middle East to see examples of conservative clothing designed to hide women's bodies; there are plenty examples in the Western world as well, and Atwood was clearly using those as examples.

Hannah's... complexion

• Hannah looks way too dark to be June's and Luke's daughter in the miniseries. She seems to have much more melanin than both her parents. Poor casting choice-when everything else was done so well and cautiously.
  • It can and does happen where a child with two lighter black parents can come out darker than either, just like a child with two dark parents can come out light; the genetics of melanin often aren't that cut-and-dried.
  • It could also be a lighting issue. The actor who plays Luke can have a big bright light pointed at him, while a tiny baby cannot, and thus will look darker.
  • Babies of high melanin content have been born to two white parents just because one has had someone of African or Indian heritage in the family, from maybe 2 generations back.
  • The books mention that June didn't really know her father, because Holly only slept with him to get pregnant and let him be as involved as he wanted, which entailed getting a birthday card and an occasional Christmas card. There is a chance June could be mixed race, too, and because of the recessive trait, Hannah could be darker skinned.

How did the Sons of Jacob break into the Capitol?

• How the heck are a group of armed men with machine guns break into what is suppose to be one of the most secure places in the country? Machine guns are big and heavy, and Washington DC has a ban on assault weapons. No one with any common sense would have failed this sort of spot check. I get that it's supposed to explain the background of the story, but this explanation stretches the suspension of disbelief a little too far.
  • It's very likely they had collaborators in the government assisting them. Also, Rule of Drama.
    • Yeah, it's stated to be an extreme faction within the government which did this.
    • After the events of 1/6/2021, I don't think this is as farfetched a scenario as once thought.
  • More to the point, where was the designated survivor when this happened? I suspect they were most likely in on it. And why would the United States even *need* to enact emergency / martial law? Most functions of the federal government are repeated at state level, and if not, just appoint a few more ministers till a new senate / house can be convened. The whole thing just points to an underlying conspiracy, where far-righters have infiltrated the state at many levels.
    • The designated survivor was Mike Pence.
    • Or, and this might be a bit of a stretch, the designated survivor was in on the attack (after all, so was Trump during the events that took place on January 6, 2021), and he then became President, later High Commander, Winslow.
    • The books are from a perspective of an Unreliable Narrator, so the event could've happened differently, just that was the official story, and since June can't read and was around propaganda constantly, she likely believes that happened.
    • It's likely that A) members of the Government were in on it, as American politicians often must wear their faith on their sleeve when campaigning, and all denominations of Christianity have had representatives at one point or another, B) martial law can be declared in times of severe unrest, like riots and rebellion, so assuming that the attack on the Capital comes out of the blue a la 9/11 and there's mass panic across the country, whoever is in the chain of command, be it the newly sworn in President or even State Governors, has the ability to declare martial law, which can C) last for a limited period of time, but provides space for a takeover of the crippled power structure when it's in a complete mess and Gilead's founders mobilize a march in force to seize what's left. People forget, the Russian and Iranian Revolutions didn't start with protest marches calling for tyranny. Interim governments were created during both, and both were co-opted by extremists who returned from abroad preaching a new ideology with an army of their followers seizing control of state operations.
    • Remember that there was a already a fertility crisis which resulted in chaos in society and likely economic problems as well. The government was very vulnerable and the Sons of Jacob took advantage of that. It’s basically the same way the Nazis rose to power in Germany.

The executed abortionists

• Don't know if this happens in the show, but in the book, were the executed abortionists whose bodies are displayed on the wall operating in a foreign country or something? There's no reason why any woman in Gilead would ever need or want to abort a child. Non-handmaids can't get pregnant, and handmaids need to have children. Where would the market for abortions be in this society? Handmaids who hate their job and don't want to have children? The alternative for being forced into handmaid slavery is being sent to the colonies, and the punishment for staying but not producing a child is... being sent to the colonies; any woman who, faced with this Sadistic Choice, chose slavery over death would not do something to sabotage her chances, and any woman who preferred death over slavery wouldn't need to game the system. Wives or Marthas who somehow slipped by screening, were actually fertile, and unexpectedly got pregnant? Is it a crime in Gilead for women who aren't handmaids to turn up pregnant? Given how children are a rare, coveted, hot commodity in this society instead of an economic liability or nuisance, what woman who never thought she could get pregnant would want to get rid of a child she unexpectedly had? Even if the woman (handmaid or no) got pregnant as the result of an affair, a society that abandoned all technology and knowledge that says this system cannot work would not have the technology or knowledge to perform paternity tests. So what opportunity would those executed abortionists possibly have for performing such a service unless Gilead is run so efficiently and has such an abundance of resources and a reputation for strength and invincibility that it can pursue and execute citizens of foreign countries with impunity?
  • They're abortion doctors from before the regime change. Basically, they're being executed ex post facto for having, at the time, performed legal abortions that under Gilead became capital crimes retroactively.
    • Or rebels who the regime is saying are abortion doctors. The 'rapist' executed was actually a rebel.
  • Gilead is also only operating in part of the country, while the rest of the country is in a civil war. And it's possible that what they're actually being hanged for has nothing to do with what Offred and the others are told. Offred is an unreliable narrator, and it's a society built on withholding information.
  • Also, there are more than simply so-called "practical" reasons for a woman to have an abortion, if it happened post-Gilead. It's shown in both the book and television series that many women take risks to do things simply because they want to, or as an act of rebellion - joining Mayday, having same-sex relationships, stealing cars, kidnapping their own children from their Commanders and Wives - despite knowing that they may die for doing so. A Handmaid may do the same thing if she really cannot stomach the idea of being pregnant by her rapist and/or as an act of rebellion against them.
    • Also, some women have health problems which make pregnancy risky. The Church is probably quite willing to pray for them and risk their life for the baby.
  • There's also no real reason to believe that non-Handmaids can't get pregnant - Gilead managed to round up and tag women they know to be fertile, but that doesn't mean that they haven't left out women whose fertility status is unknown for whatever reason. (Rita, for example, mentions having had a 19-year-old son before.) It's very likely that there are Marthas being coerced into sex or raped (or willingly having sex) with their Commanders, and some of them could potentially get unexpectedly pregnant. It may be a crime for Marthas particularly to turn up pregnant, because they're definitely not married and are not supposed to be having sex with anyone. Besides, if they are discovered to be fertile, there's a chance they might be forced to become Handmaids, and for many (most?) being a Martha may be preferable to being a Handmaid.
    • Quite the opposite, the books says that the Econowives end up outbreeding the Handmaids. Not all women were tested for fertility, just the ones who were arrested for being moral degenerates. Eventually, they expanded the definition of who was a criminal from what we see, to anyone who wasn't married in the Church of Gilead so they could steal the children and fertile women in those marriages.
  • There are also the women in Jezebel's, who may not desire to be pregnant as it would likely take away from their ability to transact business, and also may not want to be pregnant with or give birth to the children of men they are coerced to have sex with.
  • Gasp! I have to wonder if the (obviously male) original troper was kidding or something. Growing a child in your body for 9 months belongs to a completely different dimension than assessing how valuable a commodity it is! That would be like saying that anyone would prostitute themselves if their bodies were valuable enough (and by anyone I mean men, women, the elderly...). That is simply not how human beings are. Even beyond that, given how rape is clearly underreported — since women are explicitly taught that it is always their fault for leading the men on —, there would be a huge market for abortion in Gilead, as in the examples mentioned above with the Marthas. People should take their Econ 101 classes with a little grain of salt.
  • The books mention they outlawed all prenatal care, and the show mentions if you can get pregnant at all, the chances of a normal baby is 1 in 5. The reasoning behind outlawing prenatal care was likely a return to traditional values and the fact that if you know you're giving birth to a pinhead baby^note baby with microcephalia, why would you want to get rid of it?

The status of Luke and June's marriage

• Had Luke not left his first wife for June- had they not met till after Luke's divorce was finalized- would June still been deemed an "adulterous whore" and forced to become a handmaid? Also, what if Luke's first wife had died before Gilead took over? Would June's fate had still been the same- or would she have been allowed to remain a Wife?
  • I thought it was fertility that got a woman designated a handmaid. Is being made a handmaid used as a punishment? If so, how do they punish infertile women? Sent to the colonies with no choice? I didn't remember there were fertile Wives. If fertile women can be made Wives, why do they have the handmaid position at all? Why not just "reward" fertile women with the highest status and make all infertile women all servants? If this government has no objection to Wives being fertile, wouldn't it be more efficient from their point-of-view to just make all fertile women Wives and have them bear the children without the need to get a third-party involved?
    • So I think part of it is that women with "undesirable or immoral" traits that are fertile are forced to become handmaids as a way to atone for their sins, while infertile women with similar traits and histories are "sent to the colonies" instead. Meanwhile, loyal and "virtuous" infertile women are either made to be Marthas or Aunts, while wives are typically women who were married to commanders and other high-ranking members of society prior, regardless of their fertility. There are also econowives, who serve as wives, handmaids, and marthas for lower class men. So potentially, it's possible that had Luke and June not been deemed "undesirables" by the regime due to how their relationship began and progressed, they would have been allowed to remain married and June would have served as Luke's econowife. Of course, since being a feminist is considered an undesirable trait in Gilead, and I'm willing to bet they don't recognize divorce either, who knows whether they would have left June with Luke.
    • They were also being punished for trying to escape. She was captured. The Handmaids have a subtext of the history of slavery around them, and one type of slavery was that of war captives.
    • Wives, at this stage in Gilead's 'history' are the women who were already married to Commanders: i.e. just the women that the men liked for their own reasons prior to the coup. Their fertility is irrelevant as they are pure women who have desirable traits. Presumably there are fertile wives as, statistically, it would be unlikely for all the women in a friendship group to all suffer the same health problems in our own society and the infertility seems to be random (just a more extreme version of what is normal today). Plus, it is strongly implied that it's largely the men who are infertile, the Wives could indeed be fertile but not allowed to sleep with other men in order to procreate. If the cause of infertility is STDs, the Commanders frequent brothels in which the prostitutes have been sterilized or are infertile (i.e. you're probably not using condoms) and there is no investigation of male infertility it's possible that the Commanders are all catching this STD and are probably passing it on to their Handmaids. As for the idea of pregnant Marthas or other classes of women: the babies would probably be adopted by a 'Faithful' family.
    • Handmaids are women who commit crimes by Gilead standards, so for basically anything the same way they arrested Emily for being a lesbian college professor, and likely arrested Janine for being a single mother aka a "fornicator." June would've just remained Luke's Econowife, while Luke kept his profession, and if she did commit a crime, it's likely she would've become a Handmaid. We do see the example with Omar's family, where because of his rebellion and Islamic religion, he was hanged, while his son was given to another family and his wife made a Handmaid.
    • Or Luke's divorce may not have been recognized as valid, like with the Catholic Church.

How popular are the regime's ideas?

• Given that Gilead hasn't been around long enough for any adult citizens to have been born after the regime came to power and raised on its morals, the regime's ideas must have been very popular to have so many willing enforcers. For example, none of the Aunts were born and raised under this regime, but they seem more like soldiers passionately devoted to the cause than fellow slaves obeying their masters strictly out of fear of punishment (there's no rebellion or disapproval among the Aunts or anyone who shows genuine compassion to the prisoners) — were they all brainwashed and their memories erased with drugs, or do they genuinely like the new system and were part of the movement to start it? If the former, why is there anyone like June who's dissatisfied? Everyone should get that treatment if it works so well! If the latter, how did it get so popular among women who weren't raised to think women are dirty, inferior, and evil? We meet no Ofglen equivalent (rebels or malcontents) among Aunts, Marthas, or any other groups, do we?
  • Waterford and Serena discuss an Aunt who escaped to Canada and told her story to the Toronto Sun. So we haven't met a rebellious Aunt or Martha yet, but there's no reason to think they don't exist.
  • There are also subtle hints in the TV series that Aunt Lydia at least somewhat disapproves of some things: she was clearly miffed when Serena Joy told her to send the "damaged" Handmaids away from the fancy gala; and she gives Offred a long look after she discovers that the Handmaids are meant to be traded to Mexico as a commodity, which seems to imply that this is too far even for her. However, Aunt Lydia has been shown to do things "for the good of the many," so it's possible that she and many other Aunts maybe don't agree with 100% of what Gilead is doing but decide go to along because the overall structure/idea is appealing to them and they can overlook the small stuff.
  • Besides that, though, fear is a powerful motivator. Being an Aunt confers a measure of power and freedom from domestic or sexual slavery. Women have few choices in this world, and the other options for Aunts are all less appealing. It's probably easier to outwardly pretend to be a zealot and somewhat willingly enforce the rules than to betray and be tortured, enslaved, and/or worse.
  • It also goes along with the fact that Gilead is purposefully pitting women against each other so they fight each other and not the republic. Aunts get lots of privileges that women - including Wives - don't, like drinking coffee, and being allowed to read and write. If you lived in a society like Gilead, and got to do more than anybody else, I would probably get her cattle prod ready.
  • They're probably based on the female supporters of the Iranian Islamic Regime, some of whom worked in roles like the Secret Police. Whether there'd be enough of these in this context to constitute an entire caste, and not just the odd Psycho Supporter though, is another issue, but you could ask the same thing about Gilead's legions and legions of soldiers they've recruited.

Why don't all Handmaids get the same surgery that Ofglen got?

• In the TV series, Ofglen is given an operation (which I assume is female circumcision, but I'm no expert) to remove her ability to enjoy sex as a punishment. Sex for pleasure is not a privilege in Gilead that pure or elite citizens are allowed to enjoy while others aren't; even Commanders aren't allowed to enjoy sex. In any event, no Handmaids (which Ofglen is) are allowed to enjoy sex, so why does the series portray removal of sexual pleasure as a punishment reserved only for criminals? If it was the pain of the operation itself that was the punishment, that would make more sense, but that's not the explanation given. Furthermore, since no handmaids are supposed to enjoy sex, why aren't they all given the operation by default? (The fact that they give it to a Handmaid proves its effect on her fertility is not a concern.)
  • My understanding was that the clitoridectomy was performed to stop her from engaging in lesbian acts, given how the Aunt tells her she "won't miss what she can't have" and has less to do with an outright ban on pleasure. Plus, if they were to perform the procedure on every single woman, there would be numerous factors to take in to account. Not only would they have to worry about the women needing some recovery time before they are able to perform their assigned duty again, they would also have to worry about the immense amount of medical supplies that would need to be used, and given that Gilead is very much a state in need of even the most basic supplies, it just would not be feasible or wise to devote the precious resources they do have to this task. Furthermore, those resources are better used to support their soldiers that are being deployed to fight dissidents and rebel groups. Finally, even with the modern medical practices that the doctors of Gilead would have, complications can still arise during the surgery, and afterwards, including infection and complications with pregnancy and childbirth, which would be counterproductive to the entire point of the Handmaids in the first place, no?
  • Based on the Aunt's language ("now, you won't want what you can't have,") the folks in Gilead seem to believe that the clitoridectomy would reduce sexual desire in women or maybe particularly lesbians. Extremist Christian sects aren't really known for fine-tuned scientific details of women's health issues and it's already shown that Gilead would rather believe irrational misogynistic stuff than actual science (see also blaming all infertility on women).

Why the Leah and Rachel Centre and not the Bilhah and Zilpah Centre?

• Given its purpose and in-universe inspiration, wouldn't it have made more sense in-universe to call the prison designed to train women to do what Bilhah and Zilpah did for Leah and Rachel the "Bilhah and Zilpah Centre"?
  • The names aren't quite as attractive as Rachel and Leah. Rachel and Leah are identifiable as every day, modern names that any of the Handmaids could have, and subconsciously make the center sound a little more normal and less alien than Bilhah and Zilpah.
  • The Handmaids aren't being trained to BE Rachel and Leah, they are being trained to SERVE Rachel and Leah... Bilhah and Zilpah aren't the important parts of the story to Gilead Society. It's all about the Wives, from their role in the conception to their phantom labour pains.
  • And besides, Handmaids lose their names when they go to their Commanders anyway. Bilhah and Zilpah might as well have been called Ofjacob.
  • Gilead is pretty much a country full of Quote Mine. Bilhah and Zilpah were slaves not ladies-in-waiting like the word "handmaid" implies, the same way June or Janine are. In Biblical times, Hammurabi's Code existed, and it stated that if you and your wife couldn't conceive, you used her slave to do the job for her, and just adopted the child as your own. They use the Handmaid system to focus on Bilhah and Zilpah, but if you were to read of Abraham and Hagar, it is to warn against it. Sarah and Abraham wanted a child and were tired of God making them wait, so Sarah convinced Abraham to use her slave, Hagar, to get a child. Hagar was pregnant with Ishmael, but Sarah became jealous and ran her out of town, despite the fact she was probably forced to do so. The only reason Hagar returned was because an angel commanded it. Around a decade later, Sarah had Isaac and the half-brothers didn't get along.

Why is Gilead based out of New England instead of the Deep South?

• The geography of Gilead really underscores Atwood's backward, historical focus. Even in the early '80s, and certainly today, it would make much more sense for a Christian theocratic Divided States of America to be centered around the Deep South rather than New England.
  • I believe that this issue was discussed in the novel, and is an occasional trope: a person or region apparently most opposed to something, becomes its most dedicated defender or champion, once he changes his mind.
  • Word of God: Apart from Boston's pre-revolutionary history, the novel was set where it was in order to show this could happen anywhere.
  • You may not be wrong (at least when it comes to the TV show). Some of the promotional interviews for Season 3 hint that the American South is worse than Boston. Which would indicate the Handmaids there have it good.
  • A reality-based explanation is that Atwood was simply not familiar, or not focused on, evangelical Christianity, which is infamous for the "purity culture" that would be right at home in Gilead. However, in-universe, such a denomination would be (and is) rather unpopular in the Northeast, and Mrs. Winslow even says that the previous inhabitants of the mansion she shows Serena were "Baptists" (most likely Southern Baptists, as the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the US). The Sons of Jacob are more like incels running under a very thin veneer of Christianity.
    • The Northeast and is not entirely liberal and the South is not entirely Evangelical Christian Conservative. For a long time urban areas throughout the country have generally been more progressive than rural areas. It’s just that the majority of the population in the Northeast is urban compared to the majority of the population in the South. As a result the political power, and resulting stereotypes, of both regions are based on that. However rural Massachusetts is politically and ideologically very similar to rural Alabama in the same way that Boston is politically and ideologically very similar to Atlanta.
    • Incidentally Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit on whom the TV version of Serena seems to be based, grew up in Connecticut and attended Cornell University in upstate New York.

Why is Commander Waterford younger in the series?

• Why did they age down the Commander for the series? This wasn't too apparent until Offred's visit to the doctor where the doctor says he can help her because the Commander is probably sterile anyways, just like he does in the book, but there his supposition made sense as one that could actually work and wasn't just for his entertainment because he was at least 2 decades younger than the Commander, whereas here they are about the same age.
  • I don't know why they aged the Commander down, but if memory serves, age had nothing to do with why the Commander's probably sterile — the Sterility Plague is actually effecting the men, not the women, but Gilead won't admit it.
  • My understanding is that the Waterfords were aged down to make Offred seem more like a genuine rival to Serena for the Commander's affections. It levels the power imabalance between Offred and Serena (albeit, in a very small way), and so increases the tension between them.
  • The Setting Update had to age Serena down considerably to make her a believable Blonde Republican Sex Kitten; while an older woman can easily be a televangelist (like book!Serena) it's harder to pass an elderly woman off as one especially in the age of Tomi Lahren and Lauren Southern, both young women.

Moira's escape

• In the series when they escape, Moira is in the guise of an Aunt, and asks for the correct train, leaving June a few paces behind. The soldiers get June, which was obvious they would as she is alone as a Handmaid which she isn't supposed to be, but why did it not occur to her to just say, "I am accompanied by that Aunt there"? The soldiers would have gone to Moira to ask if this is true, she would have said yes, and they would have let them go, probably even quick enough for both to board the train.
  • The soldiers had been asking Moira to show her papers and answer awkward questions about where they were going and why. June keeping quiet when she was asked what she was doing wandering around on her own provided Moira with the distraction she needed to slip away from the soldiers and get on the train. If June had blurted out, "I'm with that Aunt over there!" The soldiers would have remembered the suspicious Aunt who'd avoided answering their questions and detained her before she got on the train. Result: now both Moira and June are hauled back to the Red Centre.

The sustainability of the caste system

• How is the caste system sustainable?
  The status of women is based on their pre-Gilead status; those married to party members/soldiers are Wives, fertile single/remarried women are Handmaids, etc. But all female children, both born before the revolution and abducted or born after to Handmaids, are Daughters. When they're married off, like we see in the book, they become Wives. How will they perpetuate the system of Wives/Handmaids/Marthas/Aunts/Econowives (the latter being, thus far, exclusive to the book and unseen in the Hulu series), when all new women are Wives?
  • Wives give birth to Daughters, Econowives probably give birth to Econodaughters. Who might become eligible to be Wives if their fertility seems good. Fertility testing for single women before marriage will probably separate the Econodaughters into Marthas and those suitable for marriage.
    • In the sequel, The Testaments, it's confirmed that Econowives do give birth to Econodaughters, but that Econodaughters can move above their caste if a man from the ruling echelon finds them attractive enough to marry. (Doubtless their potential fertility is also a factor in moving out of the Econo class.)
  • Seemingly confirmed, as during June's "birth", Fred meets a recently promoted Commander, whose wife fell with child without a Handmaid and was promoted because of this.

The risk of June and Nick's baby not looking like the Commander's

• In the series, Nick is noticeably darker than both Offred and Commander Waterford. Actor Max Minghella's ancestry includes Italian and Chinese. If Offred gives birth to Nick's baby, she runs the risk of it being a Chocolate Baby. Neither she nor Mrs. Waterford seem at all concerned about that and only worry about Offred getting caught in the act.
  • I mean genetics aren't that cut and dry all the time. Considering that Commander Waterford knows next to nothing about June from Before, she could easily just say "My grandfather was Italian" or something along those lines. Possibly could be backed up by providing him a picture of her daughter, since he doesn't know who the father is. It wouldn't be hard and I doubt he'd look into it much considering it wouldn't exactly be the most illegal thing that's happened in his house.
  • Given that Serena Joy all but throws it in the Commander's face with no ill effects for Offred (so far), a child is probably great enough of a boon for his career to make it unwise for him to start asking too many questions about the baby's parentage.
  • The books mention that June never really knew her dad because her mother only slept with him to get pregnant, and because she was a militant feminist, let him be as involved as he wanted, which entailed sending a birthday card and nothing more.

Doesn't the setting justify patriarchy?

• Doesn't the setting justify patriarchy, contrary to the author's intended message? If you have only N percent of women who are fertile, then each fertile woman needs to make 2*(105/N) children on average to maintain the population. If you have 10% of fertile women, that makes that each fertile woman has to have 21 children on average. The oppression of the handmaids may be horrible, but someone has to work to pay for everyone's retirement at some point. The infertility plague seems to be never actually explored in it's logical consequences, and the author seems to think that our current morality is still the best one in those society-changing circumstances.
  • Oh my god! So sexual slavery is justified if it pays people's retirements? Besides, the troper above is taking at face value the fact that the women are the infertile ones, while it has been pretty clearly hinted at that the men at least as infertile as them. Serena, e.g., might as well be fertile —- by your logic she should have sex with other men to maintain the population.
  • No.
    • Patriarchy is never a solution and that the original troper is really downplaying "the oppression of the handmaids" AKA women being forcibly raped repeatedly to bear children. The idea of the book is that extremism is toxic and can form our society into something monstrous. It would not be, nor ever be, the onus of women to sacrifice their own personal freedom to fix a world that, mostly, men corrupted. Also, science is working on making babies outside of human bodies, no sexual slavery required.
  • The society as we know it in the western world — with state-paid retirements — has collapsed. Nobody in Gilead is going to receive any state-paid pension with the birth rate so low and their totalitarian politics, perhaps with the exception of Wives and Commanders, who probably accumulate wealth anyway. Rebels or nonconforming men are executed, Unwomen, old Marthas unable to work, rebelling Handmaids, Handmaids who failed to produce a child after three years and three tries, adulterous Wives... these all are executed or shipped off to colonies to clean toxic waste and to have slow and painful death. For Gilead it won't be that hard to dispose of their frail old men and women unable to work. And another thing — the sexual slavery very clearly doesn't work so you can't even say that the end justifies the means, because in the small community we see, there are only two births (Janine's and June's babies). Who would have guessed that ritualized rape and so much stress (from living as a sex slave) lower the chance of getting pregnant and giving birth to a healthy child?

How is population growth supposed to work?

• The Handmaids get passed around to various men to have children. Would the girls then grow up to be Handmaids and if so, wouldn't that lead to a lot of inbreeding due to lack of available men so you'd have to be a Handmaid to your cousin or something? Which also doesn't solve the lack of population if now you have to worry about genetic diseases.
  • The Handmaids are supposed to be like, a one-generation solution ideally. The daughters of the Commanders are Daughters and, assumedly, the fertile ones will be married off to the Sons of other Commanders/high ranking people and the infertile ones will most likely be Marthas or something of that nature. More realistically there would probably be Handmaids for a while and that inbreeding may occur.
  • In the book, they are supposed to be an example for others and in the transitional phase. Definitely not "one generation only" solution. The daughters to commanders and wives are going to grow into Wives, most likely, but if they disobey or sin, off with them to the training for Handmaids and shipping them to the next infertile couple. Unless they are executed or sent to colonies, probably depending on the "sin" and their repentance and willingness to atone.
  • Records are kept of the biological origins of the children of Handmaids. When June looked up the records of the Handmaids, they had records of the children they bore before and after they became Handmaids, with original names and new names. "Agnes McKenzie" and "Nichole Waterford" might never have met, but it would be on record that they were biological half-sisters so that, if they both married and produced biological offspring, those children wouldn't be matched when marriages were arranged.

The empty nooses at the Boston Globe offices

• Why were empty nooses hanging at the site of the Boston Globe massacre? The headlines on the stopped press and the driver's statement that the offices have been empty since "before the war" suggest that it took place shortly after the D.C. attacks and before Gilead had taken over which would eliminate the regime's usual M.O. of leaving victims hanging as seen elsewhere in the series.
  • They could've shot those in the office and then killed the stragglers with the noose.
  • It wouldn't shock me if they just did it for the shock value; that seems to be what most of the various methods of murder Gilead employs are for. It's not super necessary to hang someone from building equipment in front of her girlfriend but you're not doing it for efficiency, you're doing it to scare the survivor. We know they killed people in the office, we don't know if or how many people they kept alive and took with them.
    • This. Also, if the journalists were all killed via machine guns, the nooses may have been left as a warning to anyone prowling around and thinking of using the old newspaper printers against the regime.

How does Gilead not collapse for economic reasons?

• On a practical level, how would a society like this not collapse for just economic reasons? Gilead has purposely removed half of the population from the workforce, meaning women will contribute almost nothing to gross domestic product (GDP). While some women are shown doing service jobs, like cooking and cleaning, the limits of being forbidden from reading and writing means they, and most certainly the generation of illiterate females which comes next, can't be skilled labor. Also, since women are non-persons, it's unlikely they can hold property or spend beyond what they're allowed in their roles as homemakers. The structure of Gilead's society doesn't seem like it serves any of the industries we know today, and probably has pissed away many of the advantages of the American economy. Consumer goods beyond necessities aren't apparent (e.g., I doubt anyone is carrying an iPhone, electronics like televisions aren't present in the homes we've seen so far, and things like clothing differences and other aspects of individual expression are gone), and I doubt many multinational corporations want to invest in the Christian dictatorship version of North Korea. Mention is made in the first season of an embargo/sanctions Gilead, and problems with Gilead's currency. Maybe in a world affected by fertility problems, pollution, and climate change (i.e., the Mexican ambassador states their staple crops are having problems growing) the bottom has already fallen out of the world economy. But still, stability is always better in economic terms, and Gilead seems like a society that would be a disaster from day one.
  • Honestly, if Gilead doesn't get shut down through force it's gonna collapse through the economy slowly and painfully. This is probably the reason they started the trade delegations with Mexico for Handmaid's—no one else wants to trade with them but other poor dictatorships and the only real thing they have to offer are their breeding chattel. Practicality wise this probably won't work out in their favor depending on how many Handmaids they deport this way, since according to the book only about 1 in 100 women can even bear children and not all of them would have been captured by Gilead during the takeover. They only have roughly 1.5 million Handmaid's to, apparently with this trade delegation, repopulate several countries. So, either they trade away most of their Handmaids and risk not being able to replace their own population or having to export another resource when it's kind of obvious that most of their food and other supplies are in short order since they need to be rationed and traded for. It's probably not gonna end pretty unless they figure their shit out.
  • The book had a brainwashed, Unreliable Narrator, and it's implied the problem is more with the men than the women. Most of the Handmaids are women who committed some sort of crime against Gilead, like June committing adultery by sleeping with a married man or Moira being a feminist. Since they're fertile, they didn't get sent to the Colonies, with the Handmaid system acting as their redemption. So, yes, there's probably more fertile women, just some aren't Handmaids.
    • It may be a mixture of ideology and economics, like how North Korea still exists while suffering from constant famines and spending all their GDP on military, but they're propped up by China as a deterrent against South Korea, Japan, and the States. Gilead's territory by contrast would be so broad that they don't need a China to prop them up- there's enough fertile land and infrastructure to keep things running for a little while. Meanwhile, the Gilead economy is gearing toward an "olden days" system to survive into the future. There's a Sci-Fi book series that shows this in a good way, 1632. Basically, aliens do something and an American coal mining town is transported to 1632 Germany, with all their modern tech and knowledge. The Americans realize that they can't bring the rest of the world to modern tech- they'll waste all their gasoline, bullets, and modern medicines in the process. So they begin a kind of controlled crash landing, aiming to scale their lifestyle back to the Industrial Revolution level, with allowances made for maintaining modern medicine and civics. Commander Lawrence might be guiding Gilead into a controlled crash landing so they'll survive when the birth crisis generation dies out in 30ish years. Returning to old farming methods, rapidly switching to sustainable energy sources, cleaning up radioactive sites while they have the bodies and technology to do so, cutting back on luxury to the point where clothing is uniform- they're literally preparing to live in the past during the future.

How do Handmaids get chosen?

• Speaking as someone who has not yet had a chance to read the novel, I'm not entirely clear on how the handmaid system works - or rather, who gets "chosen" for it. In season one I assumed that women who had previously given birth, and thus proven to be fertile, became handmaidens whether or not they had done anything wrong by Gilead standards (the exception being any commander's wife who might be able to bear her own children). I understood it as Gilead attempting to increase their birth rates by having control over every fertile woman, and that commanders and their wives were considered the elite and therefore those men were seen as having the most desirable genes to pass on, and their wives seen as the most suited to raise the children. In season two, however, Nick's wife, while not yet proven able to bear children, is certainly expected to do so. Did I just get it completely wrong, and only women who were sinners in the eyes of Gilead were eligible to be handmaids? It seems strange to me that they would choose to pair those women up with the commanders, rather than to have women considered to be pure bear their children.
  • It's mentioned in a recent episode that an Econowife was caught breaking the law and was made to serve as a Handmaid to atone for her sins. It's also implied that June was forced in the same way because she was an adulteress, she was Catholic, and she tried to escape. It's possible that if she had been Luke's first wife and they'd been the right religion, they would've been allowed to remain together. As for their purity, I think that's the purpose of the Ceremony and the Wife being present. The children are pure because in their minds God is creating a child between the Husband and Wife, the Handmaid is just a vessel.
  • In the books, that's the case, only Gilead gradually began to increase the number of crimes to increase the number of Handmaids.

The figurehead of the regime

• Who is the figurehead of this regime? Even if the coup was mounted by a bunch of 'concerned citizens', someone would bite, bribe and bugger his way to the top. And his picture would be on all the walls as a result. Fictional regimes always lack an 'Exalted Leader' - except for Nineteen Eighty Four's Big Brother, who nonetheless may not even be a real person. The only real life authoritarian regime I can think of had no real figurehead was the last incarnation of Burma's military junta and its council of cleptarchs. Ironically in its last days, pictures of Aunt Suu could be found everywhere.
  • There probably isn't one, besides God. Gilead is just run by Commanders of the Faithful.
    • There's always a cult leader
  • At its heart, it is the Republic of Gilead. Who votes and who holds office are up for debate, but the title implies there is some form of twisted theocratic representative government. There may simply be a kind of Speaker or Prime Minister position that gets passed around the senior Commanders.

Where did Lillie/Ofglen 2 find a grenade?

• How did Lillie/Ofglen obtain a grenade? Who provided it to her? How did she get her hands on one? How did she manage to sneak it? Given how Handmaids are watched so closely, this is a plot hole. Did a Guardian provide it to her? Did she MacGyver one using previously learned skills?
  • Probably, it was a part of Mayday, and smuggled to her the same way Moira smuggled the letters. Because she couldn't talk, they figured she couldn't blab to anybody like Alma, or cause trouble like June. Possibly, you're right, as it could've been a Guardian, and someone who wouldn't cause trouble, or the like.

How about U.S. embassies in other countries

• What happened to any remaining American embassies in other countries? Did agents of Gilead come to those other countries to destroy them? Were they reformed to be embassies of Gilead? Are they still being used by what is left of the United States?
  • It depends an awful lot about the timeline of events during the coup and whether any people at the top were in on it, which we still haven't got a full picture of. Most American Ambassadorships across the world are filled by the Spoils system- namely, they're appointed by the President after they win the election. Someone provides funding for the campaign, does work on the campaign trail, but doesn't have the expertise to make the Cabinet? Offer them the ambassadorship to a country. Assuming the President at the time of the coup was not in Gilead's pocket and everything happened in one day, it's likely the Ambassadors and their support staff either fled into exile abroad while the civil servants/security personnel who remained would have split down the middle- Gilead theocrats vs. American loyalists, mirroring the civil war breaking out back home. Violence and/or repatriation back to Gilead would then have followed by the host countries.

Why is Fred not executed for rape like all other rapists in Gilead

• So, Fred raped June and Serena held her down, just so they could attempt to force June into labor faster. Last I heard of a man raping a pregnant handmaid, the baby died, and was sentenced to be executed by being beaten to death by a swarm of Handmaids. So if June's baby dies because of this rape, are Fred and Serena to be executed as that one nameless guard was in the very first episode of the series?
  • Considering how corrupt they are, and knowing the consequences, they could just claim something like June hemorrhaged and lost the baby, which would be pretty plausible, considering what happened earlier in the season, or they could blame it on Nick, so he won't blab. They obviously cannot execute them in a Salvaging, because it is hypocritical, and would cause outrage and likely rebellion. We saw what happened with Warren and Janine: Warren got his hand amputated, while Janine got sentenced to stoning/sent to the Colonies, so there'd be a double standard. Fred would likely get executed or something that would be a slap on the wrist in comparison, while Serena would be sent to the Colonies or hanged for helping.
  • Plus, it's very well possible that the man killed for rape was in fact a rebel, and his crime was fabricated in order for Handmaids to have no issue killing him.

How long has Gilead lasted?

• Did I miss something or has Gilead lasted longer than a few years for Eden to be fifteen and have bought into its propaganda? But then, it doesn't take long for some of the adults given the trauma they've gone through.
  • It may be that the followers of Gilead are ok with some of its tenets because they were introduced to them early. When Serena flashes back to her college speaking tour, she says she doesn't think her speech will persuade anyone. Fred says that's not the point. The point is to put their ideas out there in the mainstream for people to hear about it and attract sympathizers- they wanted to shift the Overton Window before the coup. This was (and still is) a tactic of the Alt-Right in America. Go to a college campus, give a speech with sophisticated jargon but unpopular policy ideas, provoke a reaction from the crowd, set up your next gig and watch your book sell out online. The TV cameras show the "spoiled college kids" rioting, not the speech that quietly advocates for a "Peaceful Ethnic-cleansing" (to use one such speaker's words) so the viewer at home doesn't want to associate with rioting kids.
  • I think it's implied Eden's family was a highly fundamentalist family before Gilead. She was brought up on a farm, where she was probably indoctrinated by a fanatical mother and father. Gilead just happened to come at the right time for them. Perhaps, even, the Spencers could've been part of the Quiverfull movement, which promotes getting married as soon as possible to reproduce, and isn't shy about marrying off young women like Eden. It would be a reason why she likely can't read, and why she appears so brainwashed.
  • Commander Pryce tells Nick in a flashback that the Sons of Jacob have chapters in 30 states. So it's likely the Sons of Jacob were a widespread religious movement long before the takeover of the government. Quite possibly, there were isolated members living according to the beliefs and maybe compounds of members. It's not unheard of even now in the real United States, for instance, there's still a huge compound of fundamentalist polygamist Mormons in Texas that's seen a few raids. Their leader or "prophet" Warren Jeffs is in prison for child sex abuse. Sadly, such religious brainwashing sects do exist in this country, so it's not hard to believe that Eden has been believing the doctrine of the Sons of Jacob ever since.
    • There are whole towns in the American Southwest that have been quietly "conquered" by sects like these. Their prophet finds a small town off the beaten path, some infrastructure but nothing that puts it on the map (so to speak) and within months the population swells as religious fundamentalists buy up property. The newcomers immediately run for offices like mayor, sheriff, and town councilman, and because their members vote in a unified block, and begin passing laws and levying fines on non-believers until they're driven out of town or arrested.
  • Google the People of Hope in New Jersey. They are a (still running) charismatic cult with traditions and beliefs very similar to those of Sons of Jacob, and were one of Atwood’s inspirations when she was gathering sources for the novel. They were able to infiltrate and completely supplant a local catholic church, as well as make their way into the local archdiocese.

Canada's delay in rejecting Gilead

• Why did it take the publishing of the letters for Canada to reject Gilead? They've been taking in American refugees for years, so they know something's wrong; and at least one of the refugees (the Aunt mentioned in season one) had already gone public with what Gilead is like, so it's not like the truth about Gilead was a secret. And if nothing that came straight from the refugees' mouths has been enough to sway the Canadian government so far, why are some anonymous letters on the internet enough? Are the Canadian officials reacting purely to the public outrage? Because if so, I actually agree with Mr. Waterford — they're cowards. Not for kicking the Waterfords out due to public pressure, but for doing it only due to public pressure.
  • We don't know why Canada decided to meet with them. For all we know, they were going to discuss peace, until the letters made them realize the truth. Think about North Korea: we all know about the work camps and the totalitarianism, but nobody really does anything about it.
    • There seemed to be an element of 'For goodness sake Gilead is still around after five years so we have to deal with them' in the episode. Canada seems to be getting the majority of the refugees from Gilead since it's next door so it's not unreasonable for them to want to meet the leaders who started this mess. The Canadian leaders seemed to be looking at how to navigate relations and get a handle on the leaders despite their own feelings. The letters being published probably gave the people who were against the meeting the evidence they needed to point out that Gilead couldn't be negotiated with.
    • Also, there's the fact that Canada has a significantly lower population than the United States. Assuming the coup happened today, and only one-in-ten Americans decided to say Screw This, I'm Out of Here! and hoof it north, that would literally double Canada's population. Europe and Germany in particular experienced a huge political upheaval when one-million Syrians crossed the Greek border in 2015, with consequences that are still playing out as this troper is typing in 2019. If Forty-Million Americans fled to Canada, it wouldn't just put a strain on politics, it'd stretch their food production, their medical system, and basic civilian infrastructure to the breaking point. Luke would be lucky to get an apartment and not a shipping container or a tent to live in. In short, there would be real political pressure to send the refugees back.

Assessing fertility in Handmaids

• How are the Handmaids deemed to be fertile? Are all Handmaid's women who have already had children? And if they only want fertile women, wouldn't they want to test their fertility first before assigning them to be Handmaid's?
  • The women who become Handmaids are usually women who committed a crime and serve as one to avoid the Colonies. It's likely they test you before you get sent to the Red Center, though, so they don't waste, but knowing a woman had a child, it is probably self-explanatory.
  • We know several of the handmaids have had children previously. June, Moira, Emily, and Janine have all had healthy pregnancies before. That's a good indicator, as a start. (Although secondary infertility is a thing that exists.)

What happens to twins?

• What if a Handmaid gave birth to twins? Would they keep both? Would it be like The Giver where they keep the healthiest twin and kill the younger one?
  • I doubt that they would ever kill a child due to the scarcity of children, but I'd feel sorry for them in any case. If actual history is anything to go by, Gilead might be involved in eugenics, like doctors were in Nazi Germany. They wanted to research twins to hopefully increase the amount of Aryan children, and they also wanted to research how to limit Jewish (or any race that they deemed inferior) women's reproduction cycle or sterilize them all together. Those twins might be in for a life of tests. Hell, what's to say they wouldn't keep one child to study?
• Following that last question, what if she gave birth to twins and one happened to be a Shredder?
  • As far as the safety of the Handmaid that had the kids would go, I imagine as long as she had proven she could produce at least one healthy child it wouldn't count against her. They'd probably be upset that both twins didn't live since there's a shortage of children, but punishing a Handmaid who did at least have one "good" baby seems a little ass backwards even for Gilead.

Low pregnancy rates in Gilead

• Perhaps I missed something, but in the show, why does so few handmaids appear to actually get pregnant? We see flocks of handmaids walking about in almost every episode, but from what I recall, none of them have any visible bellies. Perhaps most noticeably in the execution in the very first episode, Janine has a visible belly, meaning several months passed here, yet she appears to be the only one with one. I know it can take several tries for a woman to get pregnant, and you can argue that their cloaks could hide a visible belly, but the same goes for scenes where their cloaks are off such as the birth scenes or in other cases; 95% of the handmaids always appear to have flat bellies as only the main characters such as Janine and June are shown pregnant. Is it too expensive or complicated to have more of the actresses wear fake pregnant bellies or something?
  • It's not explicitly stated in the TV series, but in the film and novel, the Handmaids have a limited amount of "tries" or Ceremonies before they're posted to new houses. In the film, it was implied if a Handmaid had to be posted more than three times, she was shipped off to the colonies or possibly executed. Also, if you remember the fourth episode of Season 1 ("Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum"), during Offred's doctor visit, the doctor mentions midway through the exam, "Doesn't matter. Waterford's probably sterile. Most of those guys are." In Gilead, infertility is seen as a sin of the woman not be "fruitful", as evidence by Offred's following monologue: "Sterile.. That's a forbidden word. There's no such thing as a sterile man anymore. Only women who were fruitful and women who were barren." Because of this, Handmaids and Wives conspire other means of getting pregnant, like using doctors. In the 1990 film, during the Salvaging, a Handmaid is hung for consorting with a member of the medical staff. It's implied by Offred's and Serena Joy's discussion while in the garden as well, when Offred agrees to Serena's plan to have Nick attempt to impregnate her.
  • "Is it too expensive or complicated to have more of the actresses wear fake pregnant bellies or something?" — No, absolutely not. The thing is that pregnancies are incredibly rare, both in the book and in the TV series. It shows that no matter how the Gilead may try to parade the "handmaid program" as successful, it's actually not. One baby per year in the city that used to be Boston... the society is done and people are dying out. They could have more luck with medical care, fertility treatments, supporting marriages out of love at young age, young families... Considering the handmaids are tortured (cattle prodding? burning hands? tongues cut out? eyes removed?) and raped and treated as sinful sex slaves, it's a miracle there are any pregnancies. However, it's implied the situation's the same or worse in other countries (the Mexican politician says there has been no baby born in six years).
  • Also, their reproductive strategy is doomed to failure. Even if the Commanders and Handmaids were all fertile and perfectly healthy, it usually takes having sex more than once a month to get pregnant. It’s recommended that an every-other-day intercourse schedule maximizes ones chance of pregnancy. Also, they’re using no technology to pinpoint when ovulation occurs, other than the calendar method, which long before the 80s was no longer being taken seriously in the Natural Family Planning community (a whole array of signs and symptoms are collected and analyzed, not just based on timing of menstrual periods—-for example, temperature shifts were discovered in the 30s!). That’s one of the reasons I had a very hard time taking the book seriously, but whatever.
    • The doctor in the book chides Offred for not trying often enough. They're actually supposed to perform the ceremony for the 4 days around ovulation.

How do you knit if you are not allowed to read a pattern?

• I realized this is incredibly nitpicky, but: in real life, knitting patterns are written. Even if they're in shorthand (for example, "k2p2 T 6 B p2k2"), they require an understanding of reading to know what they're short for. How are Serena and the other Wives able to knit? Or pass on their knowledge of knitting to "their" children?
  • I learned to knit (and crochet) from written patterns that is true. But, it is also possible to knit very complex patterns from a chart. So that combined with actual hands-on teaching make it very possible for a non-reader to learn handcrafts.
  • It's possible that a blind eye is turned to things like knitting patterns because knitting is seen as a suitable pastime for women, and is not perceived as a threat. Reading is forbidden to women because it suits the authorities in Gilead to keep them ignorant. Even reading the Bible is forbidden because the Commanders like to cherry-pick from it to suit their agenda. Remember what June said about leaving out the part about the meek inheriting the Earth? They could make the Bible available to women and girls as an audiobook, but they don't. The Commanders may reason that a woman isn't going to get any ideas that are contrary to the interests and goals of Gilead from a knitting pattern, and if it keeps her busy, so much the better.

Pronouncing 'Offred'

• 'Off Red' reads like a name a person might have, and I'm not sure this wasn't an intentional brief misdirect in the book. However, the correct pronunciation should be 'Of Fred' given handmaids are designated Of [Man's Name]. Yet, in the series, everyone calls June by the 'Off Red' pronunciation. Why?
  • Probably just because it's less awkward to say. Most of the other names are things like OfDaniel or OfLawrence, which have no choice but to be pronounced in a kind of stunted way. Also, pronouncing it Off Red brings more attention to the other meanings behind the name i.e., she's slightly Off Red and not very good at staying in her role and she is being Offered (Offred is another, older way of pronouncing it).

Effectiveness of shoveling toxic dirt into bags

• Does shoveling toxic dirt into bags actually DO anything to clean it up?
  • It's about removing the radionuclide-contaminated upper layers of soil and other organic matter. In theory they'd then bury the waste at a disposal site, leaving the site decontaminated.
  • See HBO's Chernobyl, Episode 4. The Soviet Liquidators did roughly the same thing to bury the radioactive particles, but with tractors and bulldozers instead of shovels. The thing is—it most likely helps in the short-term as people are not exposed to it directly, but over time, radioactivity and toxic waste might "resurface".

Did Emily's wife give up hope?

• Outside of plot said so, why didn't Emily's wife have an alert set up for if Emily arrived? Did she believe there was no chance Emily would ever escape? Was there an alert and Emily had the ability to override it being sent out?
  • She might have thought that Emily was as good as dead, mourned her, and decided to move on with her life to make the best future she could for their son.

Other countries bringing Gilead down

• There is an option no one has mentioned in the show yet, but it'd be a death sentence for June and possibly Nick: Release DNA results showing baby Holly Nicole isn't Fred's daughter. Or it's possible even just saying, 'Alright, Commander Waterford, let us take a saliva swab, and if it's confirmed that the baby in Canada is your biological daughter, she will be returned to the country containing both biological parents. If not, then, her stepdad keeps his daughter's biological half-sibling,' might work. If this something along either of these lines did happen, would this help other countries who want to bring to Gilead down, or would something like this make it even harder for them to do so?
  • Harder, most likely. "Fake News?" Plus the Canadians are leaning into Realpolitik. Gilead, for all its problems, is still the Former United States with its vast arsenal, sitting on a largely undefended and open border. If Gilead wanted, they could probably bring Toronto crashing down within days, and Ottawa within weeks. And I'm not sure anyone in this universe is interested in "bringing Gilead down" so much as making sure their lunacy doesn't spread.
    • The entire vast arsenal? As far as we can tell, Gilead only controls around half of America, and many places are in active resistance. Plus, what would be the likelihood that one coup could capture everything from private to General?

Timing of the arrest

• Why is it only now that Fred's being arrested? He went to Canada earlier, shouldn't he have been arrested then?

  • The same reason we don't arrest dictators at the United Nations General Assembly: diplomatic protocol. Also, it wasn't the Canadians making the arrest, it was the American Government in Exile.

  • Another question is, what will happen when Gilead finds out American soldiers made an arrest on Canadian soil if the two aren't military allies?
    • Which two?

How do Handmaids with sealed mouths eat?

• We see a handmaid with her mouth stitched together. How does she eat?
  • Probably through a straw.
  • The Republic of Gilead didn't think it through. The handmaids can't eat solid food nor brush their teeth, which won't contribute to healthy pregnancies. Meta answer: the showrunners didn't think it through. (The thing is, in the book, everything is coordinated to make the handmaids the best possible "uterus"—except for emotional well-being.)
  • Their mouths aren't permanently sewn shut, they're just held closed with captive segment rings looped through lip piercings. Presumably handmaids are allowed to remove the rings temporarily to eat and care for their teeth.

Who will replace current aunts?

• The Aunts are all older, likely post-menopausal women. Assuming they die at 70-80. If Gilead actually lasts more than 7 years, that's 20-30 years of service. Who replaces them? Elderly Wives when they become Widows? Retired Handmaids? Trustworthy Marthas or Econowives?
  • They probably choose and train women for Aunts regularly. They need them to keep Handmaids in line and intimidated. It's implied some women are willing to have some semblance of freedom or agency exchanged for torture and brainwashing of other women. Sisterhood among women be damned.
  • The next generation of Aunts is likely to be made up of girls growing up in Gilead, who could choose life as an Aunt over marriage. They are also likely to be get some new recruits from Wives who lose their husbands, as a widow is going to be in a precarious position if she has no family to support her. A retired Handmaid becoming an Aunt would be an intriguing possibility but it is possible that if a successful Handmaid was believed to be a true believer, somebody like OfMatthew, she could be made an Aunt when she was past her childbearing years, in the hope that she would be ideally placed to convince Handmaids in training that theirs is a blessed calling.

Why is Gilead not suspicious of June aiding Nicole's escape?

• At the end of Season 2/beginning of season 3, Emily smuggles Nicole/Holly to Canada, while June goes to try to rescue Hannah, but is caught. She then gets in trouble for trying to see Hannah. Why can't the powers that be in Gilead guess that June helped get Nicole/Holly to safety? I know Fred claimed that June and Serena tried to fight Emily off, but wouldn't it be suspicious that June, who has already tried to escape to Canada while pregnant with the same baby who escaped, then went to the house of her other daughter at the exact same time? And even if they don't suspect June, they must know that Emily didn't get to the Waterfords' house, steal a baby, and escape the country all by herself, shouldn't they be looking for members of the resistance, like they did after the second Ofglen's bombing? And even if they do suspect that June smuggled Nicole/Holly out, but are turning a blind eye because she's had 2 children, which seems unlikely, why wouldn't Aunt Lydia mention it during her outburst? Why wouldn't they try to keep a better eye on her?

Why execute Eden for infidelity

• Why was execution Eden's punishment for infidelity?
  This was Eden's first offense. Emily's trial made it clear they don't kill fertile women (at least for first offenses) - they're too rare and valuable. It's also established that Econowives who break the law are punished by being made handmaids. At the very least, her punishment should have been the ever-popular Sent to the Colonies like the wife sent there for infidelity. Why would the fertile Eden be executed, when Emily (whom she outranks) and the unfaithful wife were not, instead of being made a handmaid or sent to the Colonies?
  • Eden and Isaac were repeatedly encouraged to repent their "sin", right up to the moment of their execution. Chances are that Eden would have been shown mercy if she expressed remorse, especially if Nick indicated that he was willing to forgive. She wouldn't have escaped punishment entirely. She might have ended up sentenced to "redemption", like Emily. But her life would likely have been spared. However, there was no way that the Gilead authorities would spare an unrepentant adulteress, not unless her fertility was proven.
    • This, but also keep in mind, they had committed infidelity against a Commander. If she had been an ordinary Econowife, it would probably have been enough to sentence her to become a Handmaid. Waterford doesn't even intercede on his wife's behalf when they maim her for reading because he knows that if he doesn't allow her to be maimed, that means the woman he's supposed to be able to control can flagrantly disregard the laws, which makes him (and by extension, the other Commanders and thus the government itself) look weak, and Gilead cannot afford to appear weak. Killing Eden and Isaac, a fallen woman and a disloyal serviceman respectively (the two most disposable types of person in Gilead), refusing to admit that they'd sinned against the government can only be dealt with by execution. Anything else would undermine the importance and power of the Commanders.

What's with the classism?

• The sexism makes sense from the villains' point of view, but why the classism?
  The source behind this madness was supposedly the fertility crisis... but distributing all your fertile women among a small elite population is not going to solve the fertility crisis. All they did was create a million new restraints on women getting pregnant — the right thing if you want to oppress women for the sake of oppressing them, but the wrong thing if you want women to get pregnant.
  • The Commanders hoard all the fertile women because they're greedy and want to be sure they'll have children, to hell with the rest of the country. But really, trying to figure out where the Sons of Jacob ideology comes from, at least within the context of modern America, is a fool's errand; wealthy men, no doubt partially responsible for the environmental disasters, want to fix the environment and are willing to do away with many of capitalism's creature comforts and broader-reaching power? They're supposedly an offshoot of the Alt-right, but they're not massively racist (in the show)? They think the way they do because the story is about the worst possible society for women.

Why create Martha's

• What was the motive for creating the Marthas? Sincere or not, why did the Sons of Jacob want or claim society ought to create a separate class of women to do only domestic work without sex and marriage? Why wouldn't that be the job of Wives?
  • In the books, Marthas are symbols of power, and the more Marthas you have, the more powerful a Commander's household. They also need a use for childless, middle aged women who can't function as Aunts. The quote they probably used to justify it comes from the New Testament, where Jesus goes to see Mary and Martha is there making sure "all the preparations that had to be made".

Why did misogynist men give up sex for pleasure?

• What caused misogynist men to stop wanting sex for pleasure?
  The incel culture that wants women to stop being independent so they'll be available for sex on demand want sex for pleasure, not children. Maybe the culture was either not prominent enough or non-existent when Atwood wrote the novel, but the tv series also acts like men who believe women aren't human want them to only bear children and do chores, not provide sex for pleasure on demand. Men like Ariel Castro or the perps in every other episode of Forensic Files don't want rigid, controlled, unpleasant sex like the Ceremony and children, they want sex they can enjoy like the Sons of Jacob have forbidden; they use and abuse women for sex as an end itself. Why would misogynists create a society where they're free to oppress women... and don't use their power to get the type of sex real life misogynists and abusers of women want? A society founded by incels would turn all women into Jezebels—sex slaves for male pleasure—not forbid sex except for procreation.
  • The commanders of Gilead don't seem to adhere to incel ideology. They're religious fundamentalists, who tend to view women as 'Madonna/Whore' types. They'll have their virginal wife (or handmaid in this context) who can bear them children through ritualistic sex, and then they'll go to the Jezebels for their pleasure sex. It's notable that Commander Waterford takes June to the Jezebels when he wants to have sex for pleasure, rather than procreation.

Why do DC Handmaids wear muzzles on top of lip rings?

• Why do DC handmaids who have to have their mouths sewn shut also wear the muzzles? That's redundant.
  • To hide their mouths for modesty reasons.

Why were the Sons of Jacob OK with women as Aunts?

• Forget the question of why women are okay with being Aunts — why were the Sons of Jacob okay with women in that position of authority?
  Why would the misogynist incels who started this movement create roles that give women authority (the Wives and Aunts)? Why wouldn't they just give women with the title of Wives the roles of Marthas and have men do what the Aunts do? It's not because they've proven themselves useful or something — Serena Joy had most of her power stripped away despite contribution, so why not all of it? Real life movements like this are consistent in their misogyny; they don't have women give the propaganda speeches—they believe "mansplaining" is the proper way to teach women to know their place. You could have men keep women in line just as easily as the Aunts. The existence of the Aunt class and giving the Wife class so much power and privilege makes no sense for a group whose paramount value is the inferiority of the female sex as a whole.
  • The main task of an Aunt is to be a midwife and an early childhood nurse. These have traditionally been women's jobs, so the commanders probably didn't think too hard about whether it was better for men to do these jobs. As for having the job of the re-education done by the Aunts, there is historical precedence, as is every other detail of Gilead in the novel. For example, a lot of the day-to-day guard work in the Nazi concentration camps was done by other prisoners. I'm not sure why. Perhaps in the case of the Aunts, it helps to foster the feeling of women seeing each other as enemies, which is something the patriarchy is keen to promote.

Why not use fertility treatments or technology?

• Since we know surrogacy and by implication other fertility treatments and technology exist(ed) in this universe, why didn't they just use fertile women as forced egg donors and/or forced surrogates?
  You could impregnate the birthmothers (or Wives, if they're able to carry a child but not conceive) like they do in The Giver and want to someday be able to do in Nineteen Eighty-Four without the need for the Ceremony. Offred points out how "We're not concubines, we're two-legged wombs," so why not go the whole nine yards and keep them locked in the Red Center producing babies via artificial insemination like a factory. Then the Wives wouldn't have to endure sharing their homes with the women (I don't recall once seeing a Wife who likes the arrangement rather than enduring it because it's the only way to have a baby). Most men are sterile, but clearly not all (i.e. Luke, Nick, Warren Putnam).
  • Gilead doesn't seem to care too much about providing medical treatment for conception and childbirth in general, which itself is a headscratcher. Gilead may not have much in the way of medical equipment or medicines. Serena Joy had to get a pregnancy test on the black market! Artificial insemination requires a lot of medical resources, and is not always as effective as vaginal intercourse. Having sexual contact during conception may also play into their fundamentalist interpretation of the bible. The Bible passages about handmaids do not involve a doctor performing artificial insemination, after all. The 'ceremony' appears to be a religious rite which makes them feel as if the Wife is the one who is actually becoming pregnant. Having the handmaid near her baby also promotes breastfeeding, as seen when June is unable to lactate when separated from Holly/Nicole.
  • The novel was written back before in vitro fertilization (and artificial insemination) was really a thing, so it may have made sense back then to write a story where the handmaids had to engage in actual intercourse in order to become surrogates. In 2018-2020, it makes much less sense, especially in light of the fact that Gilead is supposed to be a Christian theocracy (because extra-marital sex is generally condemned in the Bible, it comes off as very strange that the handmaids would be required to have sex instead of just be artificially inseminated each month.).
  • It's not that Gilead doesn't know that there are other ways of producing babies, i.e. IVF, or that they don't have the technology. They consciously made it a policy to go with the methods that they considered to be sanctioned by the Bible. It would arguably be more efficient to harvest eggs from women with viable ovaries, fertilize the eggs with sperm from young, healthy donors, and implant the resulting embryos in healthy wombs, but that's not considered a godly method. The story of Jacob's wives and their handmaids is the precedent for the Handmaid system, and considered to have God's seal of approval. The rulers of Gilead believe, or pretend to believe, that the plague of infertility is the punishment for the sinful lifestyle of the world, and that it is only by embracing a godly way of life that the plague will be lifted. By that logic, using a method like IVF would just be adding to the country's sins. Another contributory factor is the determination to ignore the possibility that men, particularly men in power, could be sterile. They don't test male fertility at all. They'd rather stick to the Handmaid system, and tell themselves that if a Handmaid doesn't conceive a Commander's child, it's her fault.
    • The "it's sanctioned in the Bible" line of reasoning doesn't hold up. The Genesis stories involving handmaids are essentially about the dysfunction and problems that resulted from this cultural practice. But who knows- as mentioned above, the novel was written before IVF was in the picture, and it's too big of a plot point for the show writers to change at this point.

Disparity between offenses and punishments at Red Center

• What's the logic behind the disparity between offenses and punishments at the Red Center?
  Talking back = lose an eye. Reading or writing = lose a hand. Assaulting an aunt and running away should mean, what, lose both hands? Lose both eyes? Lose a hand and an eye? Nope, it's... flogging. Janine is maimed for life for swearing in class, while June is put in temporary pain that she eventually fully recovers from for assaulting an aunt and almost escaping. Reasoning?
  • Considering Janine was such a spitfire, and had to be dragged away to her punishment, I'd say it's possible that having her eye removed was for continued fighting back, not just a one-time backtalk.

Infertile married women after the takeover

• What happened to infertile women who were married before the takeover?
  The punishment for an Econowife who breaks the rules is being made a handmaid; thus, all Econowives must be fertile (which makes sense—well, from the Sons of Jacob's perspectives—since their husbands wouldn't qualify for a handmaid, sex outside marriage isn't permitted, and they want people to produce more babies). What if an infertile woman was married before the takeover and the couple was low-ranking in the new order? The new regime doesn't permit divorce. Would they nullify the marriage from the beginning for the crime of infertility?
  • Not all Econowives are fertile. Or, more accurately, not all Economen are fertile, given that the problem is with males, not females. However, Gilead reserves its help in producing children to Commanders and their Wives. If an Econo-couple have no children, it's tough luck for them.

Law-abiding husbands of punished Econowives

• What happens to the law-abiding husband of an Econowife-made-a-handmaid? Is this an exception to the no-second-marriages rule? Or is there simply no way for him to ever have legal sex again despite the fertility crisis?
  • In my opinion, he is considered guilty by association for "not ruling in his wife", much like a parent is made responsible for bad things their small child does. As a result, they are most likely executed.

Gilead's ignorance of Emily being a lesbian

• How could the new government not know Emily was a "gender traitor"?"
  June gets in trouble for not reporting she knew Emily was a gender traitor — not for knowing she committed a recent act of gender treachery under the new regime (she didn't know that), but for knowing she committed acts of gender treachery in the time before. Emily was married. The new government would have nullified her marriage. They would have had to have known she was attracted to women when they took over and made her a handmaid because of her two good ovaries. Why did the Guardian interrogating June act like this was new information she was obligated to report? Why didn't June tell them (true or not), "I didn't report it because I assumed you knew."?
  • According to Aunt Lydia, Handmaids are being given a "second chance" by virtue of being Handmaids—that June was a good-for-nothing whore in the previous government and that being a Handmaid is a salvation for her. Moira and Emily are both lesbians, but fertile women in a pregnancy crisis, and thus they were only spared death by salvation through being Handmaids. I always took the scene to mean that Aunt Lydia and Guardian were interrogating June for not telling them Emily was still a "gender traitor," i.e. was still very much a lesbian, and June's argument ("I knew she had a wife") comes from her knowing that you can't just stop being gay, lesbian, etc. In other words, Gilead asked, "Why didn't you tell us she's still a gender traitor?" and June's response was, "Because you don't just stop being a lesbian?"

What is "gender treachery" in Gilead?

• According to the new regime, what does "gender traitor" refer to — someone who commits a homosexual act (like how someone who steals is a thief and someone who kills is a murderer) or someone who is homosexual?
  Real life homophobes deny that non-heterosexuals are naturally the way they are, that it's an intrinsic part of one's identity that can't be changed. But the fact that June got in trouble for not reporting that Emily engaged in homosexual acts before the takeover implies that they don't consider merely engaging in homosexual acts to be a crime but being attracted to members of the opposite sex to be the crime, regardless of if you give into your desires and have sex with them or not. Their treatment of June for knowing about Emily's pre-takeover identity implies Emily wasn't punished for engaging in a homosexual act but for being attracted to women, that she would have been punished for who she is regardless of whether she committed the act or not. So the regime is run by homophobes... who recognize that homosexuality is an inherent part of a person's identity and nature that doesn't change just because they stop having sex with the opposite gender... If Gilead was run by real life homophobes, there would gender traitor equivalents of the Red Center where gender traitors are taught that they've been evil and disgusting and trained on how to renounce that old way of life... just like places that really existed before and during the time the show was made! Why would Gilead abolish a practice so similar to their own? What's their argument for why gender treachery is evil if they recognize it's not something you can control?
  • This touches on a good point, that sexual orientation is innate because it’s about how a person feels/who they are rather than how they act (for example, a gay person is still gay if they’re single, and a bi/pan person is still bi/pan if they’re in a relationship, etc.), but it’s possible that Gilead does make that distinction, it’s just that it’s not relevant to Emily. Emily isn’t a lesbian in theory, she’s one in practice, having a sexual relationship with a Martha. She’s not punished for what she feels, she’s punished for what she does. She was also married to a woman prior to Gilead, which would probably be read as proof positive that she was doing so before the collapse. In either case, the issue seems to be her homosexual acts, not her homosexual feelings. And as for whether there would/could be a Red Center for gender traitors, there already is... it’s the Red Center. The same place that shamed, subjugated and brainwashed June for being an adulteress and Janine for being a “slut” almost certainly did the same to Emily for being a lesbian. It’s established multiple times that she only reason she isn’t executed like the rest of the “gender traitors” is because she’s fertile and thus valuable as a Handmaid.

Nick and Eden's sex life as a married couple

• Since sex for pleasure is forbidden and only to be done for the purpose of conceiving, shouldn't Nick have only been expected to have sex with Eden when she was ovulating? What, is part of the criteria for a girl being married off that she's ovulating at the time of the ceremony?
  • Maybe, yeah? It seems Gilead's view is that men should feel attraction to women and vice-versa but should only act on it for the sake of siring children. Considering this is Gilead, it wouldn't be at all surprising that they would marry girls off during ovulation. If Eden was ovulating, and Nick did not act on the attraction he was supposed to have for her for the sake of children, then it's possible that's what led to Eden's belief that he was a gender traitor.
• Since Eden believed lust was a sin when she "got married", why didn't Nick get out of it by telling her, "It's a sin. We should do it as little as possible."? Shouldn't Eden have admired Nick's virtue in him not wanting to have sex?
  • There are varied beliefs on what lust is in Christian terms, and what constitutes as lust. Some believe that lust refers to immoral sexual desires (i.e. sexual desire for someone besides your spouse), others believe it refers to sexual addiction or idolatry of sex above other things, and others still believe any form of sexual desire (even in marriage) is sinful. It's not entirely clear what Gilead's views on it are (their entire system allows for sex outside of marriage, which is quite specifically condemned in the Bible) but it's possible that their views are that acting on sexual desire is okay as long as it's to conceive a child during marriage. So it seems Eden's mindset was, "This is the only time he's supposed to act on his sexual desire, so if he's not, does he not feel it for me?"
• Was Nick, an Eye, really in danger of being suspected of gender treachery, let alone executed? Eden might not have known the privileged position he enjoys, but June sure did.
  • June may have feared that even the accusation could potentially have damaged Nick's standing to the extent that he was no longer useful to the eyes, and would lose that protection.

Serena Joy's vanity

• Why does Serena have makeup brushes on her vanity?
  • In the books, Serena wears perfume, and the narrator says that it's a luxury and she must have a private source, not that it's not allowed and she got it on the black market. Handmaids aren't allowed to use hand lotion or face cream, supposedly because they're vanities but, according to the narrator, this prohibition stems from the Wives, who don't want Handmaids to look attractive. Handmaids, Marthas and Aunts are likely to be forbidden to wear cosmetics because that would be vanity, and Econowives probably can't afford them, but Wives are allowed to wear them.

Non-Western human rights issues present in Gilead?

• Why do human rights issues that have never existed within Western Christian circles (such as female genital mutilation, prohibition against women driving, and not allowing women to read), but are prevalent in certain Muslim communities, appear to be widespread in Gilead?
  • Women not being allowed to read / drive isn't an Islamic-specific thing; For the vast majority of US history before WW1 people believed that women couldn't take fast trains or cars. As for FGM, said things are practiced in those countries because it's seen as an actual cultural rite. You can think of FGM as similar to foot-binding, said things are done by culture less to punish people and more because they're painful cultural rites. So, Gilead does said things out of punishment and less of culture.
    • The point is not the reasoning behind it, but that FGM and prohibitions on women driving or learning to read exist nowhere in modern (within the past 100 years) Christian circles; they are issues prevalent primarily in some contemporary Islamic contexts. This is equivalent to appropriating a social problem in western Christianity onto a Muslim context where it does not normally exist.
  • Gilead as a concept was not developed as a Christian state, Gilead was developed as a human ranch that uses Christian-centered marketing to justify its breeding policy and make it more appealing to their target demographic. Complaining that the misogyny of Gilead borrows too much fron the "wrong" Abrahamic culture than the one it advertises is a little bit like complaining that "all-natural" fruit juice is made from concentrate and contains artificial colors. Yes, they call it that, but they only call it that so you'll buy it; that word doesn't mean anything, and it's the same garbage no matter which bottle they put it in.
  • I was actually wondering about this too, but then I learned more about Christian fundamentalist culture in USA, and... Well, while Gilead is undoubtedly an exaggeration, it's not THAT far off from their Stay in the Kitchen ideals. And while they are a minority even among the Christians in USA, one can easily imagine their ideas both radicalizing and going more mainstream in the event of a crisis. Many elements are also allegorical, like the distinction between Wives and Handmaids being representative of Madonna/Whore dichotomy. The only thing that I find a bit off, I guess, is forbidding women from reading, even religious texts (if it's about information control, strict censorship should do the trick). Lastly, the use of clitorectomy makes a frightening amount of sense in context. Amputation as punishment is already used extensively in Gilead, and in this case it also limits the "criminal's" ability to commit the "crime" again...
  • Plus, though thankfully rare, clitoridectomy and other forms of clitoral mutilation were occasionally used to "treat" various imagined sex-related mental ailments among women in the US and Europe during the 19th century. To cite one horrifying example, John Harvey Kellogg (inventor of Cornflakes) advocated burning the clitoris with carbolic acid as well as surgical removal. A vocal minority of Victorian doctors might have dealt with Emily much as Gilead did.
  • Women not being allowed to read is Fridge Brilliance. A big part about Gilead's doctrine is they cherry pick Bible quotes while leaving out the context. As June remembers, "blessed are the meek. They always left out that part about them inheriting the Earth." Marthas are essentially house slaves, and the quote Gilead probably got to justify this was about a woman named Martha cooking and cleaning; but if you look at the context of the situation, Jesus was telling her to stop doing those things so he could talk to her, which a woman could use to protest this. Besides, considering the number of people living in Gilead from before, they likely can't get away with editing the Bible.
  • Margaret Atwood took many influences from Islamist fundamentalism and Puritan culture to create the country of Gilead. Not to mention the original novel was written during the rise of the Reaganite Christian Right in the 1980s in which certain female televangelists were supporting a return to "traditional" roles for women.

How is Canada OK with Gilead being so close?

• Does Canada not seem remarkably calm considering a theocratic fascist regime with immense military power is just a few miles away? On top of that Gilead likely views Canada as a country of degenerates as they did the USA before the coup and would likely love to use their vast military power to take over a wealthy country with lots of resources. Not to mention we know there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of refugees in Canada who are all considered enemies of Gilead, a Republic not exactly known for being forgiving. Finally Canada is culturally and ideologically very similar to the US. Being as there were so many (former) Americans who supported the rise of Gilead it's reasonable to suggest that there are many Canadians who would as well. Yet despite all this life in Toronto seems completely normal and we see that the border is lightly protected.
• A) Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole. In the book, Canada being a safe haven with nothing to really fear from Gilead made sense both to satirize how Canada is often ahead of the U.S. in regards to civil liberties, and because Book!Gilead was far too busy losing a civil war to the remnants of the U.S. to attack their northern neighbors. In the show, however, by the later seasons Gilead seems to have won the civil war, meaning they are both far more powerful than their literary counterparts, and now undistracted, but the rest of the setting wasn't updated to reflect this.
• B) One of the themes seems to be how nobody is ever willing to believe how Stupid Evil Gilead is until it's too late. Like how everyone trusted the new leaders of the US even as they Put On The Reich,the Canadian government doesn't believe or doesn't want to believe that Gilead will turn its cruelty toward the outside world with no regard to the same national soviernty that's stopped, or at least justified the rest of the world not stopping them, or how doing so will likely get the rest of the world to gang up on Gilead, and how ruling Canada won't be feasible since there's not likely to be anywhere near enough sympathetic Canadians now they they've seen Gilead's true colors.

Atwood's choice in having Gilead originate from a bloody revolution

• From a meta-standpoint, why did Atwood say that Gilead came about via a violent revolution, the first stage of which was slaughtering the higher echelons of the U.S. government, if her goal was to satirize fundamentalism in American politics? Saying all of Congress and the president were slaughtered effectively lets the legitimate American politics system off the hook despite, in real life, Christian fundamentalism being one of the U.S. two primary political party's common platforms and the common presence of such fundamentalists in congress and the senate (and to a lesser extent, White House. She wrote the book in response to Reaganism). Seems like explaining Gilead as the result of one party manipulating the pre-existing system would both make the satire more pointed and premise more believable.

soldier morale

• The majority of the men in this society are a) armed and b) do not expect to have a chance at a woman — read: any legal sexual outlet whatsoever — unless they're really, really lucky because those government-run brothels are only for the high-ranking members of the government and foreign officials. Gilead shouldn't have lasted seven weeks, let alone seven years.
  • It's mentioned that some soldiers are hanged for "gender treachery" (i.e. turning to homosexual sex, probably due to this), but that just means a revolt should have been even likelier.
    • Not necessarily. The regime may be counting on a code of masculine silence to keep their troops in line. In a toxic patriarchal culture, a man will cut off his own hand before admitting that he doesn't have sex regularly or is an "incel".
    • They'd also be counting on no one realizing that, in this culture, admitting you don't have sex regularly wouldn't be admitting anything about your masculinity because you're legally not allowed to do it, and women have no apparent choice who they marry, so you could be Austin Powers and it still wouldn't matter. So Gilead would basically be coasting on an aspect of the very culture they're trying to replace. Plus, how many of their recruits only signed on for the promise of women? They were clearly able to admit they didn't have sex regularly when it was legally possible, but are just fine with their leader's flipping the script, calling them losers and not delivering?

Rest of the World

• In addition, there's never any hint of action from the rest of the world regarding this- considering that any non-white, non-male, non-... whatever denomination of Christianity Gilead practices individual is either persecuted or executed, there must be some outcry from the rest of the world. At the very least, the UN would be giving the Republic of Gilead major sanctions for human rights violations. In the TV adaptation, Commander Waterford does mention sanctions against Gilead by the European Union.
  • The fourth episode mentions the UN discussing sanctions as well.
  • Other countries likely don't invade Gilead for the same reason other superpowers don't take up arms against North Korea or Iraq: because it isn't their problem, and would cause way more trouble than its worth. Due to the similarities between Nazi Germany and Gilead, many of the superpowers knew about the Holocaust, but didn't intervene, because they couldn't end it overnight and they were already fighting a war in the rest of Europe and Asia.
  • Invading a country by force is generally a last resort. The UN, EU and so forth are simply using the first resort; economically strangling the country with sanctions until it's too weak to stay afloat. In addition, it is mentioned that Canadian and British forces are performing exercises on the border, likely to either defend Canada from any Gilead invasions or to move in on Gilead once the economic sanctions have done their job.
    • The show has implied that the fertility crisis doesn't affect just what remains of the USA, as Mexico is undergoing it, which could extend to the continental North/South America. Even if they did want to start a war against Gilead, they would likely get into trouble due to a lack of soldiers, or the effect it would have if a significant amount of soldiers died fighting a war against them.

Show!Gilead's female population

• The pilot explicitly mentions lower status men being assigned wives and more to the point, the show jetisons the white supremacist element of the series, meaning that the supply of women of all races are presumably available to the men of Gilead so there is no real shortage; whereas in the books, where minority women were either killed off or exiled.
  • Fridge Logic is easily explained by having an Unrealiable Narrator and the fact that it's highly implied throughout the book that the Republic is lying about almost everything to maintain some sort of semblance of function.
  • Odds are good that there's a lot of unreported rape and harassment of Marthas going on, that the Marthas don't report because they know they'd be blamed for their own assaults.
  • There's also the Fridge Brilliance that this isn't a functional society but a Nazi-esque reactionary one, that we eventually learn blows up within a generation. It still doesn't mean there's not a massive amount of pain, horror, and anger before it collapses. Fascist, but Inefficient indeed.

Ofglen's origin

• Where did the new Ofglen come from? Surely all Handmaids are already assigned to households (we even see that Janine is taken straight from her old posting to the new one, so it's not like there are Handmaids sitting around, waiting to be assigned.
  • There might be, though. The government is probably always in the process of bringing in new Handmaids to train and send to postings. It might be her first posting. It's also possible that in this system, some Commanders are high ranking enough that they always have a Handmaid, so there is always an automatic replacement if necessary. Ofglen 2 might have been up and removed from her previous posting if her Commander was lower-ranking, because they needed someone to fill the spot.
  • Or her previous Commander could've just plain died. The elite men of Gilead tend to be old men, and their medical science leaves a lot to be desired.
    • Though probably not the case with the new Ofglen, who appeared mostly ok with her lot as a Handmaid and didn't have much reason to avoid it, a lot of women are made Handmaids after they commit a crime. So if you're a fertile Econowife and you break the law, you can be turned into a Handmaid.

Raping Offred

• Chalk this up for Artistic License – Biology: how the hell do the Waterfords honestly think raping Offred is going to go for them? "Oh, you know what will speed up this birth? TRAUMA." Plus, I don't think that sex (not that I'm calling that fiasco sex—that was RAPE, definitely) was even proven to induce labor outside of a thinly-sourced magazine article.
  • The belief that sex works to induce labour is actually fairly widespread. It's the most-discussed means of naturally inducing labours, and has actually been recommended by doctors since the Victorian era. The theory is that ejaculate works to soften the cervix, but this is unreliable and most doctors agree that none of the traditional at-home methods work most of the time. However, this is a genuine old wives' tale that the Waterfords might well genuinely believe. Not that it excuses what they did at all, or diminishes the fact that there was probably a bit of common-or-garden vindictiveness in their motives as well.
  • There's also the fact they more or less did it to punish June, Serena for the false labor and embarassing her in front of Aunt Lydia and all the Wives, and Fred for saying the child would never be his. It was more like a two birds, one stone deal: they get a baby quicker and they keep their unruly Handmaid in line out of spite.

Gilead's coup

• How Gilead carried out its coup is handwaved in the show, but logistically it makes very little sense. It's said in flashback exposition from Fred Waterford that Gilead took over the country with "three attacks", presumably targeting the President, Congress, and Supreme Court.
  • There are as of the show's debut nineteen people in direct succession to the Presidency alone^note In order, the vice president, the Speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the Cabinet secretaries in order of date of creation of their department, starting with the Secretary of State and, at time of airing, ending with the Secretary of Homeland Security. and the Cabinet secretaries would not necessarily be affected by an attack on the White House as they each work out of their own buildings in Washington most of the time.
    • Given how every politician in America has to wear their religion on their sleeve, how many might secretly be members of the Gilead ideology?
    • For starters, 95 percent of one of the two dominant political parties in America wouldn't.
  • Even assuming all 535 members of Congress are present in the Capitol at the time of the attack, they still have to deal with fifty state governors, who would be responsible for appointing new representatives to replace the fallen.
    • See above. As difficult as it is to take a cabinet position as a member of a pseudo-Christian Conspiracy, nobody in America pays attention to local elections. State Legislatures and Governors could easily fall under the sway of Gilead or be part of the conspiracy from the beginning, especially if that state's culture lines up with Gilead's values.
    • Agree to disagree. Few people members of the public care much about electing their state senators, but most politically involved people in my experience see state governors as at least as important as congresspeople.
  • The US military doesn't swear an oath to the President or to the government, but to the United States Constitution. As well, the aforementioned state governors are each the commander-in-chief of a portion of the National Guard. (Not even Americans often realize just how much power US states have when compared to other countries.) It is very unlikely either would stand idly by when blatantly unconstitutional orders, especially to give up their arms to a private army, start issuing from any kind of "interim government".
    • Oaths are one thing, but soldiers are human beings too. They vote, have religious beliefs, and have human needs. If the chain of command is destroyed, the State Governor declares support for Gilead's interim government (especially if it forms with members of the original government as the leadership), or if society just descends into anarchy- what would you do? Honor a promise to a scrap of paper that is probably on fire right now, or run for the hills and protect your family?
    • Militaries are surprisingly durable during times of crisis and are trained to stay together; e.g, at the end of the Roman Empire, the Roman army was essentially the only organ of the empire still functioning.
    • According to one character "One day, they made us all Guardians." The implication is that most of the U.S. army and police still see Gilead as the legitmate government, and thus follow them even if they don't agree with all their policies. We're probably supposed to see them like the normal German police and Wehrmacht during WWII, Just Following Orders in contrast to the Sons of Jacob's fanatical SS. The problems with this are A. The Clean-werhmacht is a myth; it had problems with anti-semetism and authoritarianism even before the Nazis rose to power, at one point refusing to put down a pre-Nazi anti-democratic coup, and all of the Wehrmacht was well aware of the Holocaust, which to them, was simply an extension of the war with the USSR, the stated purpose of which was to kill or enslave everyone in the massive country that they saw as Jewish and Marxist. B. As stated above, US soldiers swear an oath to the constitution, and Gilead is not even pretending like they'll ever have new elections or restore the constitution, and C. The choice of the regular US soldiers and police are far more important in explaining how Gilead would or wouldn't come to be, and thus deserve far more narrative focus.
    • Still doesn't make sense. At the very least there would be extreme pockets of resistance and fighting militarily. At best America would have turned into Bosnia, or worse... Syria. There's no way a coup would be that clean. Gilead's government isn't all that steady, but its steadier than it has any reason to be realistically.
  • And all this is before you consider how such a massive plot could avoid the notice of several dozen state, federal and foreign intelligence agencies (indeed, one of the flashbacks to before the coup mentions the FBI sniffing around the cult).
    • See FBI/CIA/NSA muck-up of Al-Qaeda pre-9/11. All the signs were there that extremists were planning to hijack planes and use them as cruise missiles. Interservice rivalry, bureaucratic red tape, and good-old-fashioned Washington policy making (ignore this threat, focus on that one) could have combined to prevent anyone from doing anything to stop the attack.
  Condoleeza Rice: "I believe [the memo] said 'Bin-Laden determined to attack the U.S.?'"
  • The problem is that the aftermath is depicted as a little too clean cut. Truthfully America would be a constant warzone. like the In-Universe, example Chicago, but more wide spread. It's easy to buy an American Coup happening given the right circumstances. The problem is that it's hard to believe that Gilead would have been created so cleanly without turning into an Americanized version of the aforementioned Bosnia or Syria.
    • Promotional maps◊ for the TV show seem to indicate a few things. California and the Pacific States, the Deep South (like, the Caribbean coastline and Florida), northern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, and the Canadian border (barring Maine and New York) are in the hands of Loyalists. The Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and the central United States (Flyover Country) are the colonies or Disputed territories- implying widespread fighting and nuclear meltdowns/detonations. Gilead as we see it on the show is basically New England (minus New Hampshire and Vermont), the Rustbelt, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois. Everything else is contested in one way or another. This also lacks the nuance of modern insurgency warfare. The United States "controlled" Iraq during the Second Gulf War if you ONLY looked at a map and didn't turn on the news. Basically we're seeing the state of the States from the most stable and secure part of Gilead. If the show branches out or continues, it will likely show more about the state of the States.
    • In regards to all of the above, the coup is quite simple to dissect. The Commanders had clearly been planning it for a long time, so it makes sense that they'd be converting members of the US government to their way of thinking or getting their own members into places of power where they could facilitate a takeover. The attacks wiped out the President, his cabinet, most of Congress and all of the Supreme Court; it is highly likely that the Commanders massacred everyone in the line of succession who wasn't on their side and spared the officials who were, allowing for a (on the surface) legitimate transfer of power. As for the CIA/FBI debate, it was mentioned in a flashback by Fred that the FBI were starting to get suspicious and investigating the Commanders, so they accelerated their coup plans and wiped out the government before the FBI could nail them for the conspiracy. As for the military, an American refugee in Canada reveals to Moira that he was a US Marine and his division were absorbed into the new Gilead army, but rebelled against them. Gilead's takeover was not easy or swift; the suspension of the Constitution and nearly all civil liberties would not have been received well by vast swathes of the population, so there would have been widespread violence and resistance from both police and army units that refused to capitulate to the new government and civilian militias.
  • If a coup de'tat were to happen in the U.S., the Commanders wouldn't be the ones to pull it off given how incompetent their rule of Gilead portrays them as. I know what you're thinking; they're not stupid, just fanatical, and while purging the land of sinners didn't require them doing anything that violated their ideology, ruling a country and defeating an infertility epidemic did. But a very common conceit of fanatics and evangelicals is that they think more people agree with them than really do, so it seems inevitable that, in their attempts to set up their coup, they would have tried to recruit someone who didn't agree with them and would rat them out (and the FBI would not ignore a report like that coming from someone important). Plus, overconfidence is overconfidence, and believing God is on their side has clearly given the Commanders tons of it, so their chances at suceeding at something that would require so much preparation and caution seem pretty slim. The novel effectively runs on the Anthropic Principle.

confused Canadian Geography

• The Canadian government inviting the Waterfords to negotiations in Toronto, rather than the capital Ottawa, at first comes off as odd, but Canada wants to deal pragmatically and quietly with the Gileadan regime. If they had hosted the Waterfords in Ottawa it likely would have drawn the ire of the rest of the international community.
  • It also could have been another way to purposely show Canada does not actually approve of their actions. Not only did Canada assign lower-ranking civil servants who represented groups that Gilead oppresses (women and LGBT), they made sure Fred and Serena were hundreds of miles from the Prime Minister and rest of Canada's government.
  • From a production standpoint it also makes sense since the show is filmed in Toronto.

Possibly cutting Esther's tongue out

• Lydia being a sadistic, often mentally unstable, person is clear, but I really can't figure out what her twisted logic even is in this instance. When Lillie spoke out against stoning Janine, she was punished for convincing others 'to sin' by being unable to speak anymore. It's possible Lydia thought Esther would be so traumatised she'd become compliant, but if that didn't work, then, she'd have an angry girl who might not be able to even taste food anymore, might find it physically painful to even have things in her mouth, might have difficulty chewing/swallowing, and thus, consume less than needed even if she does comply with instructions to eat/drink, and who hell, might be allergic to something, deliberately consume this thing she's allergic to, and then, if she survived, others could be potentially be, 'Well, she couldn't orally tell anyone, she couldn't write it down, she's already been punished so much for not consuming food/drinks, so...' I do try not to expect logic from characters like Lydia, but seriously, how did she think taking something permanently out of Esther's mouth would force Esther to put things in said mouth?