u/_geshii

I'm watching The Handmaid's Tale, and the first few episodes are already shocking enough in how women are treated. But what really enraged me was the episode where June and the Commander go to the sex club.

Of course, the hypocrisy was infuriating. Here you have men who have built an entire society around sexual purity, morality, and religious righteousness, yet they can go to a sex club and indulge in exactly the kind of sexual freedom that women are denied and even persecuted for. I think later on we see the Commander even bringing Moira to June and hinting a threesome when just a few episodes earlier we see some lady getting sent to the colonies because she is a lesbian.

What irked me even more was the realisation that Gilead's moral framework was designed from the beginning to benefit men at women's expense.

I think I had initially been looking at Gilead as a society that had taken its ideas about morality to an extreme. That episode made me see something much more sinister: morality itself is being used as a tool of control. Women's suffering is justified through religion and the supposed greater good. Meanwhile, the men enforcing these rules still find ways to satisfy their own desires. Women are expected to be pure, obedient, and self-sacrificing, while men get to define what purity means and decide when the rules apply to them.

What really gets me is that the system doesn't even have to hide its contradictions from the men who benefit from it. They know what they're doing. They know the difference between the morality they impose on women and the freedom they reserve for themselves. Even the whole idea of sneaking June out of the house and into the club. Something else that comes to mind, because they maybe let June in as she was going in as the Commander's wife, are the spouses of the people in power allowed to be in such spaces or is it just the men? I think they are allowed to which makes it even worse seeing women actively playing a hand in the suffering of other women. Why am I even surprised when they hold down the handmaids for their husbands to rape them.

I think part of the rage i felt was also towards myself for not fully recognising this earlier, because the sexual violence against the Handmaids was already there. I think the episode just made it impossible for me to keep viewing Gilead's ideology as merely an extreme version of morality. It exposed how thoroughly that ideology serves male power.