That's the problem with the TV adaptation. The showrunners seem to think these people are really trying to produce babies, or at worst trying to fulfill their individual perversions. They don't take fundamentalism seriously.

I agree. If they actually aren't going to include Econowives, it's another way in which they've thrown the quasi-Biblical/Christian basis of Gilead in the dustbin.

Just because they're ruling class and living in Cambridge doesn't mean they always were (I agree that in the *show* they seem like they always were, but that's a decision the showrunners made). And since Gilead came into existence via the violent overthrow of the previous U.S. government, being "electable" by the…

OK, but to whom would he have been marketing?

Very interesting point, but the Puritans also had a distinct subculture; they didn't blend effortlessly into English society of their time. And certain features of Gilead, like the total ban on women reading, are incompatible with Puritan values. Atwood also references televangelists (not a Puritan phenomenon) in her…

1) The Sons of Jacob weren't elected, they came to power by out-and-out murdering most of the U.S. government. Aesthetics matter a lot less in that situation.

The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin (of the anti-porn ordinances, etc.) wrote a book called "Right-Wing Women" that is roughly contemporaneous with The Handmaid's Tale and goes into this: right-wing women essentially make a "bargain" that if they are "good" and make themselves the private property of one man they will…

We haven't seen them in Gilead and there are story reasons for that. There are no story reasons for us not to see them in the pre-Gilead flashbacks. At minimum, I'd like to see what Serena Joy was saying at all those talks she gave. Even in the book, which stuck to June/Offred's perspective, we get glimpses of Serena…

Sure. But the Christian fundamentalist rank and file, by and large, would not. That's my point.

I am trying to find a way to say this without coming off massively condescending, but I'll just say it: I don't think the creators of this show actually studied or paid attention to the Christian right as it actually exists.

The Handmaids' dresses are WAY too fitted IMO, both from a practical perspective (who's custom-tailoring all these dresses?) and an ideological one (they're too tight to be "modest" by fundamentalist Christian standards).

True. But on the other hand, Show Gilead's architects seem to be more media savvy, with it, clued in to mainstream secular aesthetics and values than Book Gilead's. Partly that's because the book was written pre-Internet and even fairly isolated Christian right communities really DO have greater access to that…

SO half-assed. It was like something out of a third-rate superhero movie. Evil men in suits plotting evil, and swearing while they do it so you know they're EVIL! This show has done so much better.

Oh, sure. But the point is that per Atwood, they didn't round up "the fertile women", they rounded up the women of childbearing age who had had sex outside a first marriage, hence words like "adulterer."

This is what happened in the book (from the academic conference parody at the end):

I didn't get that impression in "Birth Day" but I sure got it in this latest episode. As far as I'm concerned, forget "medical procedures", it would be rare for any woman to conceive at all under the Handmaid "constant trauma and sex a maximum of once a month with a maybe-sterile man" system (although admittedly I'm…

So you'd argue the show is saying these women are fertile enough to produce a large number of children even in sub-optimal conditions, and the Mexican ambassador is just playing along with the rest of Gilead's oddities to get a hold of some fertile slaves?

Perhaps. But we did see that parade of small children who were supposed to be the products of the handmaid system. It's hard to argue the writers aren't suggesting the handmaid system works when they're providing actual, physical, onscreen evidence that they think it works.

Margaret Atwood didn't write anything that appeared in the latest episode. Not the Mexican ambassador, not the Handmaid export, not the dozens of healthy children apparently created by this system. That's been the point of half the discussions on this page.

The showrunners are the ones who decided that it works.