The Handmaid's Tale of the Destruction of Democracy

Warning: spoilers for Hulu's/Channel 4's The Handmaid's Tale

"In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."

Things have never been so good, right? It's 2017 and more than ever before women are MPs, there is same-sex marriage and a muslim Mayor of London. Our country has never been so diverse, so progressive.
So much on the brink of regression.

10 people could be all it takes. 10 people could be the difference between the rights of gays and lesbians to marry and adopt, or not. 10 people could be the difference between the legal right to abort, or not.

No, not really. They're only 10 people, you cry. 
No, really. Because 10 people are currently the difference between Theresa May forming a government, pushing through policies that will make people on benefits poorer, make pensioners poorer, make food banks more necessary and keep people in debt for years - or fighting every policy battle endlessly for the next 5 years.

Is this where it starts? Where the tightening of security and the questioning of human rights begins?

If you haven't read The Handmaid's Tale, I implore you to read it.
If you're not the reading kind, then watch the new TV series. It's right here on All 4. 

And if you don't want to read it or watch it because you've heard it described as "feminist" or a "woman's story", then I roll my eyes at you so hard they fall out of their sockets, roll down the drain, into the sewer system and end up in a reservoir so pretty and clean I that I can't believe my eyes... 

The Handmaid's Tale is a story about the dismantling of democracy, of the ripping away of civil liberties and human rights. Yes of the society we've built, which I'm not always in favour of, but we're creating equality too. (slowly)
It tackles the stigma that gay people face, the idea that they are 'unnatural'. 
And the latest episode even includes FGM, not originally in the book, but that women and girls across the world face - with an estimated 137,000 in England and Wales. 

I hold my hands up and say I'm a hypocrite. I dismiss things for being too "girly", too "manly". These are stereotypes of behaviours that I have had drilled into me from a young age that I need to undo. 
There is really only one kind of behaviour - "human".

We all deserve equal opportunities, regardless of age, race, religion, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, or gender.

We have the opportunity right now to stand up and oppose the erosion of human rights.