The Handmaid's Warning

Why we need each other

A few weeks ago my partner and I did a whistle-stop tour through the UK and lined up dinners with as many friends as possible. One of these dinners saw me meeting a couple he has known for years for the very first time. The first half of dinner was charming, full of laughter and mutual interest and intimate mockery: you know, one of those dinners that makes you really feel like you’re in your thirties.

Then the conversation turned political. It began innocently enough, as these conversations so often do, with my partner and I railing against London and the two Australians who have made a happy home there defending it. Our arguments were myopic in the beginning, referencing things like congestion or career opportunities, before broadening out to include systemic issues like safety and poverty. We brought up the number of children skipping meals, and I was sure the Australians would nod and concede that London did indeed suck, even if they didn’t feel the worst of it, because who can possibly think that a city which hoards so much wealth and lets so many of its residents fall through the cracks is a good place to live?

“Well,” came the response, “We have to remember three meals a day is a very modern invention. For the majority of human history human beings weren’t eating three meals a day, so we can’t take that data into consideration because it’s not objective.”

Now, if this had been a Planet: Critical episode, this is the moment I would have frowned at my screen, tilted my head and said, “It’s not objective? What do you mean? And where are you therefore getting allegedly objective data about homo sapiens meal requirements?”

Instead, I lost my shit: “What the fuck are you talking about? Are we fucking debating whether or not kids need adequate calories?!”

The debate then raged on at a furious pace, mostly driven by my outage. I shot down their opinions with data, ran through their arguments before they’d finished speaking, and banged my hand on the table while stressing each syllable of certain words. I glared at the one dinner guest who tried to cut the tension with humour, and rolled my eyes with abandon. My contempt was palpable.

At one moment, while locking horns with the husband about the financialisation of property and whether or not any alternative amounts to communism, his wife jumped in and told me I wasn’t listening to what her husband was saying, that I wasn’t hearing him. She was right, and I knew she was right the moment she said it, but I still couldn’t bring myself to listen to every alternative to capitalism be branded as “global communism” so I pretended to listen to appease his wife and then scoffed at his argument that hard-working people would be punished by policies seeking to redistribute wealth.

At the very end of the conversation, the wife spoke very quietly, forcing us all to stop squabbling, and stated with calm and intent that no matter what utopian system we may envision, society is inherently corrupt and will always be corrupt, and that it fundamentally depends on the charity of those with bigger hearts to function. Now, is it fair that such a burden fall on someone like her while someone else with much more to give may choose not to? No, it’s not fair, but that’s the state of the world, and how it will always be.

My jaw hit the floor as my brain seized up with the attempt to follow the argument and fit it into the context of a debate that began with questioning whether or not children skipping meals was even a bad thing. Thankfully for all of us, the waiter arrived with the bill, desperate to kick us out. In the five minutes it took us all to split the bill and pay, I came out of my rage enough to see I had behaved towards this couple who had travelled one hour to meet me with disdain and that, understandably, all my data had fallen on deaf ears because it came out of a twisted mouth.

As we were putting on our coats, I congratulated the wife on her helpful interjections, telling her I had indeed not been listening. She smiled gracefully, and we all pretended to laugh off the interaction, as if it hadn’t been personal.

Reflecting on the argument on the way home—namely that they had experienced my contempt and disdain, I felt the familiar curling of shame in my stomach. I had responded to what I had perceived as their unkindness with unkindness of my own, and then looked at them as if they were stupid when they didn’t agree with me. I had behaved exactly as they expected a leftie intellectual to behave, thus missing an opportunity to invite any new or even exciting ways of thinking about issues they already engage with. Rather than surprising them, I had confirmed everything they thought they already knew. I had done everyone at the table a disservice—me, a journalist who has made it her job to have difficult conversations.

I write this on the cusp of the election because no matter who becomes “the leader of the free world” tomorrow we are all going to be confronted with incredibly difficult conversations with people we disagree with to such an extent their existence feels like a threat to our safety—and in many cases it is. Aside from casting a vote, we can do nothing in the next few days to address the systemic inequalities that generated such a vast ideological divide beside how we choose to have these conversations. And converse we must. Remember the wisdom of David Graeber who said the moment we think we cannot talk to another human being is the moment we have decided they are no longer human. Language makes us human; we enact violence on that we consider to be less than.

It is true that part of these conversations will be confronting people who think of us as less than human, or undeserving of the humanity granted us by the civil rights movements of the last century. Do we really prove them wrong just by talking? Do they suddenly snap out of their trance the minute our tongues move? No, but as long as we are talking with one another, we are stemming the worst of violences and holding space for the possibility that whether or not we will ever see eye to eye we will at least look one another in the eye.

For it is also on us to look at our perceived foes in the eye and attempt to understand there must be reason beyond good and evil for their beliefs and actions. The working classes all around the Western world have been forgotten by those whose votes they depend upon; men have no modern role models for their behaviour beside a litany of religious texts who impress their power upon them; our social media algorithms reflect our own biases back to us. To prescribe good or evil to either side is to forget the many forces acting upon us all at every given moment; it gives innate power and entitlement to those whose beliefs we wish to see bound to the past. It forgets we need these people onside if we are to dismantle the machinery of horrors we are bearing witness to everywhere.

I know it is hard. The idea of men repealing laws which protect women’s sovereignty, medial autonomy, financial liberty and choices makes my blood boil. I don’t have a script for how to share space with a man who thinks the best I have to offer the world is birthing sons, and that I should not be given a choice as to when and how that happens. And I firmly believe there is very little I could say to him that could change his mind. My partner could, though.

This is why we need each other. Men should be defending women’s rights; white people should be defending minorities’ rights; heterosexuals should be defending queer rights. This is not about speaking for one another but about engaging in the tactic of collective defence rather than exhausting our resources engaging in the much more demanding self-defence against someone who hates you. This is about strengthening the networks of solidarity so our votes cannot be split, and so that the real minority, over time, is exposed as the small network of elites who seek to control our resources for their own benefit, whether those resources be our ovaries, our labour, or our minds.

Our rights are not a given. Witnessing global politics the last few years it almost seems as if fascism is the default. Rights are not a given because they are won. And when they are won, they also bestow responsibility on the liberated to fight for the rights of others. We face a terrible reality in this election where the pro-women candidate is also pro-war. Some people are protesting by not voting, or casting a vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. I understand that impulse, I truly do. But there is no world in which Jill Stein wins against Donald Trump. The only potential victor is Kamala Harris, and women will only be able to mobilise for Palestinians under Harris. Under Trump, American women will be too busy fighting for their own rights.

My best friend and I began rewatching The Handmaid’s Tale this weekend. It is even more painful to watch now than when it first came out because we have slid even closer to Atwood’s portrayal than Christian fundamentalism. We are in more danger now than we were five years ago. Their plan is clearer now than it was five years ago.

We noticed different things watching it this time around. Namely, the enormous amount of armed men standing on every street corner. These characters have no lines, they are easy to miss, perhaps even more so by their omnipresence. Yet, this time we saw them because we see them already—the men who retweet deeply misogynistic opinions about women’s roles; men who make podcasts about birth control being a sin; men who write anonymous posts about being owed sex by women; men who overturn court rulings protecting women’s right to abortion; men who criminalise girls crossing state lines for medical care. These men live with us already; the coup has already begun.

And so we must talk to them before they become men who will take up arms. We must find kind ways to have what we perceive as totally fucking inane conversations about birth control because the most important thing is changing their minds. We must find smart ways to have conversations about misogyny because the most important thing is changing their minds. We must find ways to keep talking with these men because as long as they are talking they have not yet become the men who strip rights away.

There is a moment when kindness is not the answer, when we must defend ourselves from violence. But we must also remember that while a conversation feels hard violence is harder still. The hill we have to climb once our rights have been taken from us is much steeper than the hill we have to drag bigots up. There are also those who are not bigots, but are steeped in doctrine, and may be able to walk with us if we show them the way.

I am not a Christian. I do not believe in sin, or that there is an inherent war between good and evil. I believe, as usual, that a small group of elites are making a grab to control resources, but this time the flavour is religious rather than globalist. There is nothing new here, even the reality in which they win and everyone who isn’t a white male becomes second class citizens. We must remember there are elites grabbing resources at the expense of others all over the world all the time, and most of us are ignorant to most of that violence. That ignorance does not make us evil—it makes us uneducated. There are very few who stand in the face of horrors and think it a good thing, and those who do are mired in propaganda aimed at their own existential fear.

Perhaps the only thing we have in common in this world is fear. If so, we must find a way of speaking to the fear in one another, just as those who seek to divide us do. We must find the humanity trembling at the heart of hatred and hold it close and reveal to it our own trembling hearts.

I am frightened. Often, when I am frightened, I shout. I raised my voice and rolled my eyes and growled at those Christian fundamentalists because their words frightened me. I mistook ignorance for deliberate violence, and missed the opportunity to show how violence is a proxy of resource accumulation.

We always have words. Words; after the bread and the wine are long finished. Words are our last gift and our first line of defence; not a line drawn in the sand, but a question hung in the air.

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