The Handmaid’ s Tale – A Review

“Keep your shit together”, she keeps saying to herself, as she recites the woman-hating words along with the rest of them: “Her fault! Her fault! Her fault!”
"...it was a sign of what was to come. Of that misogynistic righteousness that was boiling over, of that old primal male need to judge women by their body, to brand them by their sexuality, which is to their eyes threatening and offensive and in need of “punishment”. It is out there in our own societies too. In victim blaming when it comes to rape, in American schools that teach abstinence and encourage girls (only girls of course) to sign “virgin pledges” and offer them to their fathers (!), in women being slut-shamed for having relationships or (the horror, the horror) children out-of-wedlock. In the specific and increasingly more popular narrative favoured by porn and pop culture, in which the man is the punisher and the woman wants nothing more than to be punished, that subtly works on a subconscious level as a very affective way of bringing back the traditional gender roles of old, systematically altering the way relationships (in sexual as well as psychological, political and social terms) are being viewed by a whole generation of young people! "
Art & words by Fanitsa Petrou