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100 Things I learned from The Handmaid's Tale


1. You can have a constant light sweeping the house in which The Commander lives, yet walk around as you please to go screw his chauffeur whenever you want.

2. A female prisoner can simply put on the clothes of the "warden" and waltz right out of the prison/building.

3. As soon as you round up all the fertile females you can find, and throw them into a gym and "brainwash" them, they'll automatically turn into a bunch of Moonies.

4. Handmaids who give birth can immediately hop up off the birthing table and start walking away.

5. A ruling body obsessed with fertility won't bother to check the fertility of the men, only the women.

6. Only Republicans are power crazy fanatics.

The whole world is a very narrow bridge. The key is to be fearless. R' Nachman of Breslov

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7. No one bothers to do any medical research to find a cure or run around for this problem

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Yeah, I figured you didn't pay much attention, OP.

"You can have a constant light sweeping the house in which The Commander lives, yet walk around as you please to go screw his chauffeur whenever you want"

You didn't see the wife making sure to help her avoid the light?

"A female prisoner can simply put on the clothes of the "warden" and waltz right out of the prison/building"

Those guards were switched around and hardly familiar with which women were which.

"As soon as you round up all the fertile females you can find, and throw them into a gym and "brainwash" them, they'll automatically turn into a bunch of Moonies"

Clearly not all of them did, but many were young, had lost everything, and now had everyone in power and a terribly crushed country both telling them this is the way it was meant to be and forcing them to behave.

"Handmaids who give birth can immediately hop up off the birthing table and start walking away"

A woman TRIED walking, and could only limp before an older woman took her back to bed and told her, obviously, "You shouldn't be walking".

"A ruling body obsessed with fertility won't bother to check the fertility of the men, only the women"

This one's kind of obvious: that's what that kind of absolutely power-obsessed, men-rule patriarchy WOULD do.

As for the last line, it obviously goes waaayy beyond normal political parties.

For the second person: we know that horrible chemical spills damaged fertility badly and was beyond immediate control; we do NOT know that no one was trying to find a cure, but once the insane religious bureacrats took over, everything was under their control.

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Look at the current debate over the cause of climate change. If we can argue over/ignore the science of that, then plausibly the science of infertility could be debated/conveniently be ignored in a similar fashion.

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8. Some people will go to unbelievable lengths to defend a horrible movie.

"Love isn't what you say or how you feel, it's what you DO". (The Last Kiss)

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LOL And some will go to harder lengths to criticize parts of it that are perfectly valid.

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I agree with whitespirit. I haven't seen the movie yet, but much of what's being criticized is explained in the book. For example:

A female prisoner can simply put on the clothes of the "warden" and waltz right out of the prison/building.

The men living in this world live in just as much fear as the women. They too are expected to deny the existence of any sexual urges, and if they were caught looking too closely at a woman, they could be severely punished, even hanged. So they generally avoided looking at women period. That was why it was so easy for the main char's friend to sneak past the guards.

As soon as you round up all the fertile females you can find, and throw them into a gym and "brainwash" them, they'll automatically turn into a bunch of Moonies.

There are lots of psychology and sociology classes that cover things such as the power of groupthink, and the ability to control the masses by using fear. This is not at all unbelievable.


A ruling body obsessed with fertility won't bother to check the fertility of the men, only the women.

As whitespirit said, this is a dysfunctional, extremely patriarchal society. Only the women are checked for fertility, as it is assumed that all men are fertile. This is why, when Offred does not get pregnant, Serena Joy (the wife of the commadant) persuades her to sleep with the chaffeur. Serena badly wants a baby, and she knows it is likely her husband who is the infertile one, but she cannot do a thing about it. To say that it was his "fault" would be to challenge the very system itself.

Only Republicans are power crazy fanatics.

This ones just weird to me. Unless the movie makes up something that is totally not in the book, this simply isn't true. In fact, political parties are not mentioned at all in the book, and I remember getting the feeling that they no longer existed. (Of course, I only read it once, so I could be wrong on this point.)

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Excellent rebuttle mmd147

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This is supposed to be a HUMOROUS thread.

Thanks for ruining it with your seriousness

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9. Scrabble is a good aphrodisiac.

10. Pray you don't get assigned to a guy named 'Al'.

11. Peeing on a stick is no longer good enough to detect pregnancy.



You don't choose the soy sauce, the soy sauce chooses you.

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