While we were all busy celebrating the achievements of women worldwide for International Women’s Day yesterday, Netflix went and dropped the trailer for season two of The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s a stark and not-at-all-subtle reminder that, while we’ve made progress, we are far from being treated equally. Sure, the series is fictional — but the oppressive regime it depicts isn’t all that far from the truth. Women are being exploited in garment factories by brands out here peddling International Women’s Day platitudes. Female refugees are suffering at the hands of our government. Trump’s busy bulldozing Planned Parenthood and Theresa May is basically just paying lipservice to women’s rights whilst Yarl’s Wood exists. Women around the world are being monumentally fucked over.
The trailer sees a montage of fairly ominous looking clips, with Elisabeth Moss’ character Offred narrating the routine for the dystopian world’s handmaids: “Wear the red dress. Wear the wings. Shut your mouth. Be a good girl. Roll over and spread your legs. Yes ma’am. May the lord open.” It concludes with the question that we ask ourselves on a minute-by-minute basis — when we read another story about sexual harassment or unequal pay, or when a slimy dude tells us to ‘cheer up love!’, or when the Daily Mail posts another article rendering an intelligent and established woman as a slab of meat: “Seriously? What the actual fuck.”