Good article. I don’t know about this though. Is it dismissive? I guess it certainly could be.

It could also make it all the more real for some white people, particularly women, who kinda don’t really want to engage.

Hard not to, when it could be you.

I keep thinking of the jury summation delivered by Matthew McConaughey in A Time To Kill. Remember that? He asks the jury to close their eyes and goes through what those men did to that little girl in brutal detail. And then ends with, “Now imagine she was white".

It was so impactful because you were expecting to hear the usual rally cry, “imagine she was your daughter", right? We’ve all heard that a hundred thousand times. But saying “imagine if she was white" brought it to your door a different way. It demands you realize this was a hate crime based on race and asked you if that was the kind of world you wanted to live in. If not, what are you going to do about it?

It’s hard to say how effective Handmaid’s Tale is in that vein. I think it will come down to the individual and their life experience. Certainly, there are still a lot of women who need to wake up and stop supporting the far right who are actively bringing the horrors of Gilead back into reality for any woman.

Regardless, if you’re not getting anything useful from it, I’m glad you’re not watching it. It’s pretty brutal.