The appalling vanity of Western feminists who think Margaret Atwood writes about them

Imagine a country where women have no jobs, no rights and are valued only for reproductive success. Imagine a country where girls aren’t taught to read in case they get ideas. Imagine those women and those girls having to cover themselves head to toe in restrictive red dresses and white bonnets in case men get ideas. Imagine public stonings and hangings of deviants to terrorise the populace into a state of paranoid purity. Welcome to the Republic of Gilead.

It is almost 35 years since Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. The book envisaged the United States becoming a theocratic dictatorship, its byzantine cruelties leavened by folksy Puritan homilies: ‘Praise be!’ With fertility in decline, elite couples in the regime had fertile females assigned to them as ‘handmaids’. The wretched brood mares took the name of their Commanders. Atwood’s heroine was called Offred — literally ‘of Fred’.

This week a sequel, The Testaments, was published. It was hardly your average book launch. Atwood held court at the National Theatre as the actress Lily James read aloud and the event was broadcast live to cinemas around the world. With all due respect to the author’s brilliance on the page, interest in The Testaments was largely driven by the Emmy award-winning TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (now in its third series). Proof that it had become a bona fide cultural phenomenon came when make-up mogul Kylie Jenner held a Handmaid’s Tale-themed birthday party. Guests were ‘gifted’ an ‘iconic’ red cloak, women had ‘Of’ put in front of their names and everyone got tanked up on ‘Praise Be Vodka’ and ‘Under His Eye Tequila’. The 22-year-old billionairess attracted criticism for being ‘tone deaf’ about all that rape and torture stuff. But, c’mon, guys, lighten up: Gilead was trending!