In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood shows the fact that men are given way too much power and have way too much credit given to them. I think that she is trying to get across that men are the weaker gender and women have power over men. It may not seem like it on the surface, but I think that is the point she does try to get across. She wrote The Handmaid's Tale shortly after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, during a period of conservative revival in the West partly fueled by a strong, well-organized movement of religious conservatives who criticized what they perceived as the excesses of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The growing power of the religious right heightened feminist fears of a reversal of the gains women had made in previous decades. She shows a society without female rights and dominated by males could not function properly. I think that women do have a lot of power, but more is deserved, and they should be treated with the same respect as males. I definitely think that men are physically stronger, and it has been debated who is the smarter gender, I personally think males are, but when it comes to trying to find a girl, and when you do, you"ll drop everything on a dime to do whatever they want you to because we can be manipulated with sex. And I think that it is shown in The Handmaid's Tale that the women are in control. .
At first in The Handmaid's Tale it seems that males are dominant. There is no argument there. The men run society and are perfectly in control over everything and if anyone breaks the rules they"ll be punished. But when Nick and Offred meet in the living room, that fateful night, everything changed. You don't get to read the story from Nick's perspective, but you do read that he doesn't hesitate to kiss her even though he is risking so much. "He puts his hand on my arm, pulls me against him, his mouth on mine, what else comes from such denial?" (Tale, 98).
