It’s Baby Making Time

Heading through the later chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale, I have come across some sick, twisted tactics that this hell hole of a town uses to enforce hierarchal power. I am not able to get over the fact of how these women are so nasty to one another. There is SO much horizontal hostility happening throughout this story. It’s sad, because through horizontal hostility, these women are reinforcing the system in which entraps them all.
Something I found interesting, located around chapter 19, was when Aunt Lydia was speaking of the ‘Jezebels.’ Jezebels were women who did not want to have children. Aunt Lydia refers to them as “scorners of God’s gifts” and shows the handmaids a graph of how the birthrate had fallen over the course of history, eventually falling below the “line of replacement.” She further explains that women who did not want to breed were lazy sluts. WOAH!
Ok, first of all, doesn’t one need to be having a ton of sex with everyone to be considered a slut? But she is saying those who DO NOT have sex are sluts, and LAZY sluts, for that matter. HMM. So, Aunt Lydia isn’t really making much sense here, but nice try? I’m sensing a double-bind, the whole screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don’t situation.
Reading this nonsense reminded me of what I believe was chapter eight that we read in Jessica Valenti’s book, Full Frontal Feminism, entitled ‘Real Women Have Babies.’ Valenti speaks of how women’s reproduction rights are used to keep women in their places. She further explains that women who decide they do not want to have babies are looked down upon and are seen as unnatural because women are suppose to want to have babies, that it is a natural inclination. This is the exact idea Aunt Lydia is forcefully slam-dunking into the handmaid’s brains. They are forced to be raped in hopes of becoming preggers. This is clearly what Jesus wants for his creation. The messed up system of hierarchy is not only using the women’s bodies as a tool to oppress, but religion and God to justify the oppression, saying this is what God wants--for them to suffer. We can see how Offred is silently and perhaps unbeknownst to herself, fighting back. By her experiencing her own intense sexual desires for Nick (the guard) she is gaining a sense of her own sexuality and desires without experiencing pain or suffering and giving the middle finger to Gilead and all its untruths while doing so. Hooray!