Some thoughts on The Handmaid's Tale TV show

There is something wrong with this show and I can't quite put my finger on it. 

My very first impression watching The Handmaid's Tale TV show was that June was incredibly selfish for not understanding the moral imperative to reproduce when society is undergoing a birth rate crisis. 

Then for a while I thought that maybe the show was more of a fetish for white women who fantasize about being raped by powerful men, these men who just can't keep their hands off  these completely boring and average looking women. 

Then I watched it again and came across with the impression that it was actually somewhat accurate. The show is grounded in a real material force: a crisis of sterility. Moreover it is conceivable that people would go to great lengths to kidnap other people's babies and institutionalize forced breeding, and let us not forget that a great many conservatives actually do have a fetish for being cuckolded by left-wing degenerates. I mean they love sending missions to Africa so why wouldn't they want to force left-wing women to give them babies? 

Many elements of the plot are perfectly plausible. Serena seems to have an unrelenting hatred of June and this makes sense because she was rendered sterile by a would-be assassin's bullet from a left-wing terrorist. June, for her part, is unrelentingly passive aggressive and hostile, and just a nasty woman to be around. It seems to accurately model the toxic dynamics that can exist in a family when two females who hate each other are forced to live together, something I have seen glimpses of with an ex-girlfriend's family. 

But there are things that seem completely unrealistic, like sending any fertile woman to the "colonies" to work in a radioactive wasteland, or building a multimillion dollar "Rachel and Leah Center" for only a few dozen Handmaids. Cutting people's tongues out, surgically removing their eyes, or amputating a hand come across as unrealistic. Religious mutilation is an Islamic behavior that doesn't transpose well onto Christianity. It's not their style. 

A real ultra-right wing government is going to be run by men, and only men, and those members of the male sex are going to be rational, and every horrible and inhumane thing they do is going to be motivated by rationality with religion acting as the window dressing only. They might even be religious fanatics, and they might even let their ideology get ahead of themselves, drink their own Kool aid so to speak, but their motives will be materially grounded even as their rhetoric is religious.

This means that instead of mutilating handmaids (and making them ugly) they would probably just lobotomize them. If these men have the will to mutilate they've already got the will to lobotomize.

Commanders would be disciplined either by demotion or firing, (or maybe imprisonment or execution) but not by keeping them in their jobs and amputating a hand. A man subjected to that level of brutality can never be trusted with power again since he will harbor resentments, so better just to fire or kill him. 

But lobotomized handmaids and commanders that get shot don't make for a plot line that drags out the drama. It's also unlikely that Nick would have any moral objections to fucking a girl that looks like Sydney Sweeney (even if she is young). We're talking about male nature let off it's leash, after all. He would also have no particular attachment to June, unless he lost his virginity to her, because she's ugly as fuck! Oh he might have a problem giving up his kid, but I doubt he would cling to June that much after being given Sydney Sweeney to play with. On the other hand Sweeney is dressed in the most sexless possible attire so all the women except Serena are pretty pointless to look at.

But female projection never models male cognition well. 

This show came out in 2017 after Trump got elected and ran until May of 2025.  I once used dating apps to date around 25 different women over the course of several years, mostly 2016 to 2021. I encountered a lot of liberal women with a bad attitude and when I compare their behavior to this TV show it becomes obvious where they got their script for unrelenting unpleasantness. People are really that stupid: see TV, copy TV. And why wouldn't they be? In the ancestral tribal environment stories taught people how to behave. Humans are simply not evolved for it to be any other way. There are billions of people walking around with television scripts informing their real life opinions. An obvious example of this is the shear hostility people have towards Nazism which they don't have towards communism, despite communism killing more people. Why? Because they have seen fascist-as-bad-guy a thousand times on the screen but never communist-as-bad-guy.

On a related note tech bros have the opportunity to become cultural influencers with AI.

Civilization belongs to those who have the will to think, and if you as a right winger don't grasp the importance of controlling societies story telling you should be taking wide loads from Jamal in prison, because that's how hard you deserve to lose. Emperor Palpatine was right to hate on people for their lack of vision. In politics, creativity is a moral imperative, and for all kinds of reasons. Creativity lets you get out of Faustian bargains and Trolley problems, lets you outwit your enemies, strategize conquest, and avoid getting fucked when you are down. I have been in so many conversations with conservatives who instinctively react with knee-jerk contempt against any creative idea. These are people who only know how to say "no" but never "yes" to anything better. In the competition between vision and negativity even a bad vision for the future wins. You have to not only get over your lack of vision but envision something better. But asking a conservative to have creative vision is like asking a cripple to run, but here we are with no other choice.

Could you write something as good as The Handmaid's Tale? Something whose cultural impact was as significant but in a rightward direction? It's good because millions of people watch it. The fact most are midwits matters not, friendo, for if slop is what influences the masses, then slop we shall serve. Could you make slop as tasty as Margaret Atwood's? Either do it or hire people who can. As usual you must seize the means of cultural production.