In the fourth episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the gripping new Hulu adaption of Margaret Atwood’s novel, Offred, our narrator and heroine, goes to the gynecologist. She lies on an examining table, her lower body, and the male doctor poking at it, concealed from her view by a gauzy white curtain. Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, is a handmaid in Gilead, the brutally repressive patriarchy that has subsumed the place formerly known as the United States, and a handmaid’s job is to reproduce; she is “a womb on two legs,” solemnly raped once a month by her Commander, Fred (Joseph Fiennes), as she lies rigid in the lap of his “barren” wife. At least the official explanation is that she’s barren. The nation’s plummeting birth rates are blamed on its women. Offred’s doctor has a different idea. The Commander is probably sterile, he says. Most high-ranking men in Gilead are. “Sterile. That’s a forbidden word,” Offred thinks. For a woman, to speak it could mean death. 查看全文>>