I watched a few episodes, just to see what it was about. At first it was somewhat interesting, and I thought they might possibly avoid making the show an excuse for sex scenes, but … of course they couldn’t manage that.
The premise of the show is that humans have become far less fertile — I think because of our ecological sins, but I didn’t pay much attention to that aspect of the story. That stuff is so boring.
Anyway, women who can bear children become scarce, and when something people want becomes scarce, the value shoots up. This reduction in fertility precipitates a fundamentalist religious takeover of the culture — where women can’t own property, sex is regulated and restricted, and women who can bear children become slaves. Not sex slaves, exactly, but they become the property of a high-status family, and they have this weird, very unsexy, ritualistic sex once a month to try to conceive.
What would make things go in that direction?
If fertile women are scarce, and therefore valuable, that would provide one type of incentive for only rich men to have access to them — the same way it is with any other very valuable commodity. (Note: I don’t like that language either. People should not be treated as commodities, but sometimes it helps to think about things that way.)
Since there’s a sense in which babies are a public good, the community as a whole also has an interest in ensuring that the few women who can have babies are taken care of, and that the babies are raised in the best environment possible.
I think most modern people would envision a very different sort of response to a catastrophic drop in fertility. I think most of us would assume that we’d let life go on as it will, but we’d invest public funds in ensuring that fertile couples and their babies do well.
I would like to believe that if we have such a crisis, we will go in that direction. But I doubt it.
The sociology of sex is weird. Economic situations can influence how a culture regulates sex. For example, polygamy tends to develop where society is divided between the very wealthy and the very poor. The logic seems to be that women (and their children) are better off with a share of the rich guy’s resources than they are with all the resources of the poor guy.
Another example has to do with the relative difficulty of survival. Cultures that live where food literally grows on trees, and the necessities of life are relatively easy to come by, tend to have looser attitudes towards sex. The opposite is true as well. Where life is hard, the rules tend to be stricter.
All those examples make sense when you realize that society has an interest in protecting women and children. If life is easy, hey, it doesn’t matter so much if the father isn’t a good provider. The mother and child will get along okay. But if life is hard, it makes a big difference, so it’s important to have rules to make sure families stay together and fathers are there to care for their children.
Or say I’ve read. That might all be nonsense, but let’s play along with the idea and see if helps to explain The Handmaid’s Tale.
We should also consider what we’ve learned from the pandemic. Our preference for live and let live, Libertarian rules is very thin and fragile. Once something becomes a public threat, other priorities take over.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, taking care of mothers and children becomes absolutely essential, and this creates an extreme, very strict solution. Whether the precise solution in the story would serve to maximize reproduction is an interesting question, but what’s more interesting to me is another assumption — namely, that a crisis in fertility would result in a movement in a certain socio-religious direction.
It’s not as if people think these things through. People who live on tropical islands don’t think, “Gee, we have to make sure the little tikes are taken care of, and it’s better when the father is around, but life is so easy I guess it doesn’t matter that much. Fine, we’ll let people run a little free.” And people who live in barren wildernesses don’t think the opposite. In fact, in my experience, very few people think about the economics / sociology of sex at all. But somehow or other, the rules develop and change in response to changing circumstances.
I find that fascinating. It’s almost as if there’s some hidden intelligence directing culture, and people aren’t consciously aware of it.
I’m not in any way trying to defend the repressive, crazy regime in The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s an awful view of the future. But it also provides some interesting room for thought.