This is one form of resistance: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. She expends much of her energy simply resisting the urge to see what is happening to her and around her as anything but horrific-anything but shocking. The book’s narrator, Offred, understands that. In a story full of villains, ordinariness is its own kind of enemy. In this world, ritualized rapes are known as “ceremonies” murders of dissidents are dismissed as “salvagings” violence is made so routine that it becomes unremarkable. Its invented language is strategically casual. Much of its propaganda is aimed not at angering people, but at soothing them. Gilead, like many of the real-world regimes that inspired it, uses ordinariness as a tactic of oppression. “It will become ordinary.” She means this as a promise, but in truth, it is a threat. “This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time, it will,” Aunt Lydia, whose job is to indoctrinate young women into the ways of Gilead, assures her charges. Read: American cynicism has reached a breaking point They are doing much of this in a way that might be familiar to Atwood’s readers: They are treating these elemental threats to democracy as if they were business as usual. Lawmakers in several states, empowered by the nearly friction-free spread of Trump’s Big Lie, are attempting to limit people’s ability to vote-and building the power to cast as “fraudulent” those electoral outcomes they find politically inconvenient. But The Handmaid’s Tale is urgent again for another reason as well. State leaders are currently attempting to legislate away the rights of, among many others, trans people, of other LGBTQ people, of women. And they retain that power today: The Trump administration may have concluded, but its encroaching cruelties have not. Both the book and the show were timely parables of gendered violence, reminders that history can also move backwards.

When the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in 2017, the show was a textbook piece of Trump-era resistance art-a direct reply to the preening misogynies of the newly elected president. In a culture that is adept at turning tragedy into comedy, even the darkest of dystopias might be consumed, in the end, as a signature cocktail. One of the lessons of The Handmaid’s Tale is the ease with which horror can become a habit.

It was also, as so often happens when the extended Kardashian family is involved, grimly eloquent. It featured guests garbed in blood-red gowns servers dressed as “Marthas,” or women enslaved for household labor and drinks with such names as “Under His Eye tequila” and “Praise Be vodka.” The whole thing was cringey and absurd. The event had a theme: The Handmaid’s Tale. In June 2019, Kylie Jenner shared with the world some pictures of a birthday party she’d thrown for a friend.

The handmaid's tale atwood