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Don't let the bastards grind you down.

There's a lot of talk about women's rights these days. There were times where I thought: enough already. You girls got it good. I looked around me and saw women with strong voices and a million choices. If they wished to go for a career, they could go for it. If they didn't, no biggie. Their liberty seemed greater than men's in a lot of respects. The power they wield over men is magnificent and often described as the greatest humanity is capable of: a woman's love. They can choose to give it or withhold it. Men's political and physical powers look puny and artificial in contrast, as their strings are constantly pulled by forces they can't resist. Somewhere deep inside me I had a hard time believing things could really be so bad for women, with their majority in numbers and all this strenght at their disposal.

But then you turn on the news or you open a history book. You look outside your own country. You look at a presidential candidate talking about women as animals, as goods to be acquired, as territories to be conquered. You see people making excuses for it, making light of it, you see in their eyes they assume that it's normal. You see laws that tell women what to do with their own bodies, in the name of religion or the greater good. You hear of households where tiny kings use their physical power to terrorise their tiny kingdoms. And then you see all the machinations that have gone into trying to rob women of their mystical, almost holy, powers in greater kingdoms, machinations that often seem on the verge of systematising in the blink of an eye.

So, having accepted that the Woman's struggle is real, I was reading The Handmaid's Tale that paints a picture of how things would look like if circumstance and evil succeeded in stripping women of all the agency they have. When they have succesfully been ground down by the bastards. Bastards aren't Men, per se. Or all men. Or only men. This isn't so much a story about women versus men. It's a story of the artificial power against the real one, a story where the former won.

It's a bleak picture. Atwood uses the very claustrophobic perspective of Offred to great effect. Offred is the eponymous handmaid who find herself in a dystopia where her only societal value is also a curse: her fertility. Her world consists of her room, a stroll down the stairs, a garden, a walk to the butcher and her one and only societal mission: to get pregnant. She has to wear a cape that allows her to only look directly in front of her. She's isolated and stripped of her identity. Even her memories are slowly disappearing and losing relevance in a surrounding that offers nothing to link them to. Through this narrative Margaret Atwood succeeds in donning that same vision-confining cape on her readers' heads, immersing them in that same claustrophobic atmosphere.

This books does very well what it set out to do and that also explains why I didn't thoroughly enjoy it. I wanted more background. I wanted more explanations. I wanted more adventure. I wanted more action by the protagonist. I wanted her spirit, still apparent in the secretly hoarding of butter and the plotting of small thefts, to break free and wreak havoc among the bastards. Make them lose without losing herself. I wanted more direction. I wanted the flashes of hope to last. In short: the author succeeded in making me want what the protagonist wanted. She showed me what it is we should all strive to avoid actively.

An important book, and a good one to boot.