In the years following Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the author was accused of witchcraft, or clairvoyance, depending on who you asked. She denied both, rather accrediting the birth of the dystopian novel that follows a puritanical society to her observation skills. The Handmaid’s Tale is her most iconic work, so much so that it was adapted into an acclaimed TV drama, and even warranted a follow-up coming-of-age novel, The Testaments, published 34 years later. The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize in 2019, has also seen a recent critically-lauded TV adaptation of the same name (2026). This, once again, raises the question of whether Margaret Atwood foretold the future, or whether her books became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fictitious country of Gilead once formed part of the United States. As the birth rate declined drastically due to a fertility crisis, a cult-like group of people overthrew the government to establish their own theocratic and totalitarian regime based on the Old Testament. Women were forbidden to read, were stripped of their individuality through colour-coded uniforms, and severely repressed by social codes. Those who failed to follow the strict rules of the government, or were seen as traitors of its doctrine, often faced capital punishment – mainly hanging. Those who got off lightly, could be caught without a tongue or a hand.

Though the life of women in The Handmaid’s Tale is an extreme example, elements of the novel have manifested in the modern world. Our own declining birth rate has been troubling governments across the globe for years, although this has only gained widespread media traction in the last year or so. Not a week goes by where you don’t come across features, reports and expert interviews about the issue; some blame the decline in births on the disconnected 21st-century society (aka them damn phones), the cost of living crisis or the increasing rates of women in higher education. South Korea and Hungary, to name a few, offer monetary incentives for couples to start families; UK’s far-right party, Reform, ceaselessly pedals the idea of heterosexual couples having more children.

Amid the rising fertility crisis comes another increase: countries who are reverting on their abortion laws. Infamously, the overturning of Roe v Wade criminalised abortions in the United States in 2022. But it’s not the first, nor the only country, to go back to restrictive reproductive rights. Poland, El Salvador and Nicaragua preceded the US in either full, or near full bans of abortion. Some individuals have reported being denied prescriptions for hormonal birth control by pharmacies in Poland as the use of contraception goes against the pharmacist’s personal views. The running thread between these four countries is a slide to the political right. With last year’s election of Chile’s staunchly Catholic far-right president, José Antonio Kast, the country may very well be the next to ban abortions.

Life in Gilead can easily be viewed as a manifestation of far-right ideologies. The TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was a hard watch not only due to the torments the women were subjected to, but also the brutality of the first years of the totalitarian regime, not too dissimilar from despotic far-right governments in recent history: gory deaths, mutilated corpses, forced disappearances. By comparison, The Testaments is a walk in the park.

The Testaments focuses on the young girls of Gilead and how they are shaped to make the perfect wives by the Aunts, including the antagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia. We get a glimpse into their school life – if you can call it that – and the preparations for marriage once the girls are ‘blessed’ with a period. Violence is unavoidable, but it’s subdued in comparison to The Handmaid’s Tale. Even stylistically, the first show is drab and bleached of colour, on the cusp of winter; The Testaments, however, seems to be perpetually stuck in the throes of a warm spring day. The young girls, or Plums thanks to their purple uniform, sit around learning how to embroider, weave and get to climb up a raised flowerbed in front of their English country manor-inspired preparatory academy to show their gratitude for not being barren. The Testaments was not designed to have the shock factor of The Handmaid’s Tale. Its purpose was to leave the viewers disturbed: the reality of these young girls is not at all inconceivable.

The Plums of Gilead have accepted their fate. You might even argue that they have been conditioned to believe that their way of life is the right way – that Gilead is the utopia. Modern viewers would disagree. A Plum exists to be protected and shielded from the wider horrors of the world. But the second she’s able to bear children, she is prepared to be married off to a man usually thrice her age. Seeing Chase Infiniti, who plays the show’s protagonist Agnes, be ogled by men plainly older than her fictional father leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

But in the TV adaptation of The Testaments, Agnes is visibly a young woman. Infiniti’s character would not get away with being younger than 16. In the UK, you can legally marry at that age, with parental consent. But the average age for a girl to get her first period is between 12 and 13; some get it as young as nine. Under the system of Gilead, those children would be of marrying age. In Gilead, being married to a man in his 30s is a rarity.

Now’s a good time to count your blessings that this is fiction. But for some it is not. In the last two weeks Afghanistan has legalised child marriage once the girl gets her period. The Taliban took care to state that the silence of a “virgin girl” can be taken as consent for the marriage to go ahead. I cannot help but think about all the Plums whose marriages have been arranged by the Aunts; the Plums that had to sit silently and go along with their families’ and future husbands’ wishes.

Afghanistan may be far removed for most, a different world entirely, but it does not negate that this is happening. The West itself is not free from the ideologies that are central to the system that maintains Gilead.

***

As the Plum girls are force-fed a diet of what constitutes the perfect wife by their community – meek, submissive, obedient – we, too, are swarmed with traditionalist content, although on social media. But what is social media if not an extension of our immediate environment? Many have reported on the fact that algorithms show a preference for pushing right-leaning short-form videos, the most popular form of social media entertainment.

What is unnerving is that once a minority in the far corners of the internet, these ideologies have seeped into the mainstream. They, in turn, have given rise to the likes of the manosphere, tradwife content and wellness influencers fuelled by MAHA’s modern medicine denialism. The divisive satirical novel written by Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear (2026), delves into the issue of traditional content online. Reading between the lines, a tradwife is an over-the-top homemaker (think making everything from scratch like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman), a mother, and a woman relying on a man for financial stability.

While everyone is entitled to live their lives in whatever way suits them, the increase in influencers who promote this lifestyle alongside the manosphere rhetoric and the rise of the political right is a deadly cocktail for the rights that many women, and minorities including the LGBTQ+ community, have fought for for centuries.

Like the protagonist in Burke’s novel, Natalie Heller Mill, many of these tradwife influencers utilise the romanticisation of a life in the private sphere, unburdened from the stressors of a regular 9-5 to ensnare their audiences. While they may not be working ‘typical’ jobs, the ‘tradwife’ is their career. Ask Yesteryear’s Natalie, how much of what she does for the camera stops once the film cuts, once the lighting is not primed by ring lights, and ingredients for the next sourdough loaf are not arranged in aesthetic ceramic bowls. Impressionable children and teenagers – and some adults – see this content and fall for the fantasy that the influencers are selling us. The wife of a high achieving commander in The Handmaid’s Tale, Serena, was an influencer of sorts herself. And then she used her following to help her husband and the revolution that built Gilead.

But there are less obvious ways in which influencers promote right-leaning ideologies – often masked as a form of female empowerment. In May, Andréa Becker wrote about the promotion of a ‘natural’ womanhood online for The Atlantic. In summary, reproductive choices which allow women more freedom in terms of sexual liberation and control over when and how they get pregnant are becoming demonised. Slogans such as “the menstrual cycle is a gift” are spreading far and wide online. Having read this in Becker’s article, I could imagine hearing it fall from the lips of the Aunts and Wives in The Testaments, if only they used scientific terminology.

The main focus of a natural womanhood is the rejection of hormonal contraception, which dulls the miraculous effects of hormones. (The same effects which are severely exaggerated by the influencers and businesses that promote going natural). This messaging may seem feminist or empowering, but that is not the case, as Becker puts it clearly in her article:

“Claiming that the menstrual cycle is mystical and powerful might sound feminist. But teaching women that they should naturally feel erratic at virtually every point in their cycle could lead women to downplay – and miss out on treatment for – actual mood or hormonal disorders. The attitude also has social consequences. Denigrating hormonal birth control when access to abortion is restricted could leave more women with unwanted pregnancies; it dovetails with some pronatalists’ argument that women should dedicate themselves to motherhood and the conservative push for women to embrace traditional gender roles…If women are susceptible to biologically driven instability, how could Americans possibly trust them to be equal to men? To hold political power? To run companies?”

It is unfortunate that the belittling of women due to their hormones and menstrual cycles has followed us into the 2020s. What is most disappointing is the fact that now a growing number of women actively feed into this idea. In The Testaments we learn that it was the women who set up the schooling system in Gilead and, once again, women who constantly upheld it.

The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are not the only novels whose stories have come to life, be it literally or subtly. Margaret Atwood’s MadAddam trilogy (2004-2013) about a world devastated by genetic engineering and a pandemic of sorts also paints a surprisingly recognisable reality. George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is another example used ad nauseam. There are many other writers who have ‘predicted’ and will continue to ‘predict’ the future through their fiction. They must draw their inspiration from somewhere, and it is time we began paying attention to their observation skills.

Subscribe now