Opinion: Why We Should All Still Read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has been endlessly dissected, criticised, misinterpreted and more recently, dismissed. Some argue that it reinforces the very patriarchal structures it seeks to critique. Others say it’s become outdated, an artifact of 1980s feminist paranoia rather than a relevant warning for today.

They are all wrong.

The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t just relevant—it’s necessary. In a world where authoritarianism is creeping ever closer, where reproductive rights are being chipped away and where radicalised misogyny is growing louder online and in politics, Atwood’s novel remains a vital and harrowing read. Dismissing it now is not just ignorant—it’s dangerous.

The Power of Dystopia: A Warning, Not a Blueprint

It’s easy to misunderstand dystopian fiction. Some critics claim The Handmaid’s Tale presents women as helpless, as if the novel is an exercise in fatalism rather than a call to arms. But that critique misses the point. Atwood doesn’t hand us a Hollywood-style rebellion with a perfectly structured resistance movement and a fearless heroine leading the charge. Instead, she gives us a slow, suffocating collapse into totalitarianism, a regime that doesn’t just enforce oppression but convinces its victims to comply. The true horror of Gilead isn’t just the brutal restrictions; it’s how they become normal, even acceptable.

To those who argue Offred is too passive, consider this: “To tell a story through an unreliable narrator, and to make this narrator an ‘everywoman’ is to firmly situate the reader in their perspective and impose the narrator’s views onto them.” Offred’s passivity is the point. She is not Katniss Everdeen; she is not June Osborne from the Hulu series. She is a reflection of how most people actually react to oppression: with quiet compliance, with small acts of survival, with the desperate hope that things will somehow change on their own.

That should scare you more than anything.

Reality is Catching Up to Fiction

Atwood famously stated that nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale is invented; every misogynistic policy and punishment in Gilead has happened somewhere, at some point in history. “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the ‘nightmare’ of history.” This is not sci-fi. It is a historical precedent, woven into a terrifyingly plausible near future.

And let’s not pretend this is all in the past. Women are currently being stripped of reproductive rights across the world. Laws policing what women can wear, how they should behave, whether they have the right to bodily autonomy are actively being debated, reinstated and enforced.

Look at the United States. Roe v. Wade was overturned. Birth control access is under threat. Donald Trump was re-elected as President. Look at Poland, where abortion is virtually illegal. Look at Iran, where women are beaten for daring to remove their hijabs. Look at the countless online spaces where men advocate for reducing women to their reproductive function, calling for a return to “traditional” gender roles with the same fanaticism as Gilead’s commanders.

The real question isn’t whether The Handmaid’s Tale is still relevant. It’s whether we’re paying attention.

Male Privilege and the Enforced Gender Hierarchy

Male privilege forms the backbone of Gilead’s entire cultural milieu, along with heterosexism and the enforcement of a strict gender binary. Anything close to an LGBTQIA+ identity is considered an abomination. When Aunt Lydia speaks about “Ofglen,” she doesn’t just condemn her—she dehumanises her: “That girl—that thing—was an offense to God. She was a disgusting beast.”

There is a disturbing rise in reactionary backlash against feminism. The idea that men are being “oppressed” by gender equality is gaining traction. Figures like Andrew Tate push the narrative that feminism has “gone too far,” that women need to “know their place.”

This is not just some fringe internet nonsense. It’s infecting mainstream politics. Young men are gravitating toward hyper-masculine influencers who tell them that feminism is to blame for their personal failures. And what happens when that resentment festers? It turns into policy. It turns into governments making laws to “protect” traditional family values, to “restore order,” to strip women of their hard-fought freedoms in the name of stability.

Isolation as a Tool of Control

Gilead doesn’t just suppress women through violence—it isolates them. Handmaids are kept separate from each other, trained to distrust and betray. Their uniforms have “wings” that obscure their vision, forcing them into individual bubbles of silence. Even their walking partners are meant to spy on them rather than offer solidarity. The result? A world where even standing beside another woman doesn’t mean you are safe.

Isolation isn’t just a dystopian tactic—it’s a real-world abuse strategy. Abusers cut victims off from friends and family, ensuring they have nowhere to turn when the abuse escalates. Gilead institutionalises this same technique on a mass scale and the psychological toll is devastating.

One of the most psychologically manipulative forms of abuse is minimising, denying and blaming. Gilead thrives on this. When Handmaids report assault, they are forced to chant, “Her fault, her fault.” When Serena Joy is beaten by Fred, she later rationalises that it wasn’t “abuse” because it was “appropriate” according to Gilead’s law.

Gaslighting is not just something that happens in intimate relationships. It happens at a societal level. Women are told they’re overreacting when they point out sexism. They’re told misogyny isn’t real, that they’re imagining things, that feminism has made everything equal already. Meanwhile, systemic oppression tightens its grip.

We Need to Read It. And We Need to Keep Talking About It.

Dismissing The Handmaid’s Tale as outdated or ineffective is an act of privilege. It is a luxury to believe that we are safe from the kind of oppression Atwood describes. Because while some readers roll their eyes and say, “this could never happen here,” millions of women worldwide are already living their own version of Gilead.

This book is a warning. A call to vigilance.

Read it. Think about it. Then look at the world around you and ask yourself: how far are we from Gilead? And what are you going to do about it?

Edited by Elizabeth Strassheim

Image: Filming of The Handmaid’s Tale at the Lincoln Memorial by Victoria Pickering, 2019 // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0