When The Handmaid's Tale hit the bookshops and then the screens, no one needed to explain anything to us. We understood it before the first line was spoken.
The long dresses. The covered heads. The uniformity, the row of women walking with lowered gaze through a city that no longer belonged to them. The clothing spoke before anyone opened their mouth, and what it said was unequivocal - here a religious order has seized power over Man, and the women pay first.
None of us, sitting paralysed before the screen, suggested that the handmaids had perhaps chosen the garment themselves. No one asked us to respect their religious expression. No one called it diversity. We saw a system, and we judged the system, and we were right to do so, because that is how you read a civilisation's architecture - not through the individual's motive, but through the order that shapes the motives.
An American priest recently pointed at something most prefer to avoid.
Drive through Dearborn, Michigan... or Hamtramck. Or Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis. Or take a walk through Molenbeek in Brussels, Rosengård in Malmö, Rinkeby in Stockholm, Angered in Gothenburg, Saint-Denis north of Paris, the quarters behind the station in Marseille, Tower Hamlets in London, Sparkhill in Birmingham, Bradford, Luton, Leicester, Marxloh in Duisburg, Neukölln in Berlin, Favoriten in Vienna, Grønland in Oslo, parts of Rotterdam, parts of Antwerp, Gellerup in Aarhus, Vollsmose in Odense, parts of Nørrebro in Copenhagen... and so on...
The visual language you encounter there is not identical to The Handmaid's Tale, but it is related, and it is related in the way the fiction taught us to recognise in three seconds.
Yet something strange happens the moment the image moves from the screen and out onto the pavement. The vocabulary shifts. What in the series was called 'oppression' is now called 'expression'. What in the series was a regime's signature is now a personal choice, which it would be intrusive even to question.
Or rather: a choice you have been taught that it is fundamentally wrong even to ask about.
And perhaps it is not so puzzling after all.
We have for half a century been told the story of the white, hateful, patriarchal Christianity - told so persistently that the image eventually felt like memory. So when Gilead appeared on screen, the recognition was immediate, because the narrative and the figure were already installed - the series just had to switch it on.
It is always easier to judge one's own tradition. Particularly in the Western world, which is one of the few civilisations that has the Freedom to do so at all.
It lies exposed, the language about it is free, and the judgment costs nothing - on the contrary, it is rewarded by the Man in the Television and his many clever Experts. What is odd is that the image we judge by does not exist in the tradition itself. It exists only in institutions that have abused it, in power that has dressed itself in its language - and precisely that distinction, between a tradition and its abusers, is something we are carefully trained to draw in one place and carefully trained to forget in the other.
That reckoning we owe ourselves - and we take it. But back to the matter, because notice what has happened here. In the fiction we were allowed to see the order behind the clothing. In reality it is precisely that we must not - we are asked to see each woman in isolation, severed from the system her clothing is part of - as though an ancient civilisational pattern could be dissolved by insisting that it exists only one person at a time.
The criticism is not directed at her. Or her choice of clothing. It never was. It is directed at the order that determined what her options even consist of, long before she makes any choice.
That was what we hated with a pure hot heart about Gilead. The humiliation. The oppression. The demand for involuntary submission. The crushing of the Spark and the Image we know is placed in her. The removal of Freedom and Responsibility.
And then there is what makes reality more disturbing than fiction, not less. Gilead required a catastrophe. A coup, a civil war, a constitution torn to pieces, a collapse of fertility. The series had to construct a breakdown to make the image of an orthodox, malevolent and misanthropic Christianity credible.
What we see in European and American cities has come without war, without coup, without anyone voting on it - and with a language that is so thoroughly mined that those who describe the change are treated as extreme, while the change itself - the greatest demographic, cultural and spiritual displacement that has ever occurred in peacetime, without conquest and without decision - is treated as normality.
The audience's discomfort before the screen was genuine, and it was right.
Man recognises unfreedom when it sees it. The instinct in us - in you - is not faulty. What has been trained is not our ability to see - it is the list of places where we have permission to use it.
We recognised the tyranny immediately. We have just been told that it was only allowed to bear its name when it was invented.
❤️🔥🪽
And it is possible you do not believe me on this question.
I do not hold that against you.
Look at what I am - White. Man. Middle-aged. Bald. Heterosexual. Five characteristics I have not chosen, cannot shed and have never been asked about - and the Man in the Television has spent half a century telling the world that precisely that combination is the dangerous one. 😅 Not something I have said. Not something I have done. Skin colour, sex, age, orientation - read directly off the body and converted into suspicion, before I have opened my mouth.
But ok, then do not believe me. Talk instead with the women from Iran who have fled here to escape precisely what you have just read about - women who know the difference between fiction and reality, because reality managed to cost them everything before they got out.
Ask them if they think the image is exaggerated. I guarantee you. They needed no television series to recognise the garment.