I gotta say … it’s been hard to find the time to blog recently given all of the amazing content that’s been released for the summer.  I’m hopeful that this blog will be the first of many about all the “must-see” movies, TV shows and podcasts that I’ve seen or heard, but to kick it all off, the series that I just finished … and that TOTALLY sucked me in … was The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.

I read the 1986 book by Margaret Atwood in high school (which, in retrospect, was unbelievably cool of my English teacher because I went to a high school in small-town Texas where I needed my parents’ permission to check out Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which appears as #67 on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books from 1990 to 1999” (when I went to high school), while The Handmaid’s Tale appears as #37).  Margaret Atwood is the master of dystopian fiction … 2004’s Oryx and Crake being, I think, her best … so I was predisposed to like the book because I’m a huge fan of post-apocalyptic-inspired everything.  There was a 1990 movie with Natasha Richardson and Faye Dunaway that wasn’t great, so I was a little skeptical of the series.   But boy, was I wrong.  With the changes they’ve made to flesh out the back story, they’ve enhanced Margaret Atwood’s tale to make it topical and even more thought-provoking.

I’ll be honest, when I first read the book, I thought it was an interesting thought exercise, but entirely unrealistic.  Why wouldn’t there just be in vitro fertilization with surrogates?  Rape cast as a religious ceremony …what woman (and how many men) would really go for that?!?  But then I thought of “Comfort Women” in Japan during WWII, who were basically conscripted to be concubines.  Or a woman like Phyllis Schlafly, who started her own “alternative feminism” by opposing the Equal Rights Amendment and arguing that a woman’s purpose is to serve her husband.  O‎r right-wing politicians that look to a group of men to legislate what women can and cannot do with their own bodies.

Reproduction should not be used as a form of control.  Bearing a child is an amazing experience, but women should not be locked in to that path solely because of their gender.  And if women have other goals … to travel, to build a career, to have a life outside of their children … then allowing them to achieve those goals will make them better, more effective mothers.  It’s a win-win, in my opinion.

So to get back to The Handmaid’s Tale … I really thought I should wear red for this post, but it’s those pristine white wings that stick in my mind.  As Offred says, “They are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen.”  But white can be eye-catching as well … as with this awesome jacket from Yigal Azrouel that I paired with a sequined Blumarine t-shirt and MiH jeans.  Being a badass in white leather is the kind of future I want …