It’s a daily onslaught: one after another at record pace, draconian laws are being passed restricting women’s rights. Meanwhile, providers of women’s health care are increasingly unsafe, even after one of them was brutally assassinated. And we all spent much of this past week wondering with (somewhat) bated breath whether the Federal Government would actually be brought to a complete and total standstill over the funding of women’s preventive health care and birth control. It feels like a perfect storm. And so for those of us familiar with its parameters, it’s been hard to avoid the comparisons to Margaret Atwood’s fictional misogynist dystopia, Gilead, the society that backgrounds “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“The Handmaid’s Tale” was written by Atwood 25 years ago. It is a sophisticated literary novel exploring the psychological havoc of misogyny and totalitarianism on one woman’s existence, and at the same time it’s a Swiftian “modest proposal” written to show us the logical extension of religious extremist, anti-sex, anti-woman thinking that was nascent in the 1980s (and remains alive and well). Gilead is not a futuristic society. It’s an alternate version of what would happen in America in the case of a cultural and religious shock doctrine.

Two things occurred to create Atwood’s Gilead: one was mass sterility due to environmental and social catastrophe (including, quite eerily “exploding atomic power plants, along the San Andreas fault, nobodys fault, during the earthquakes”) and the other was the subsequent rise of an armed Christianist movement which was already strong, but took advantage of panic and instability to take over the government and corral its citizens into regimented gender roles. For women these include “Marthas”–sterile woman who are domestic servants, “wives,” who perform the social duties of marriage, “jezebels” or prostitues, “aunts” who are brutal enforcers, and “handmaids,” who exist solely to reproduce. Everyone else is an “unwoman” and doomed.

But in the novel, the advent of this cataclysmic change was more subtle and slow than one might think. Atwood’s conflicted narrator, Offred, acknowledges that fact, explaining before the final takeover things were getting worse and worse for women–but the well-off among them were ignoring it:

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

It’s that sort of creeping fascism that’s happening as we speak. The proliferation of “Handmaids Tale” jokes and references in the past six months in the face of an unprecedented “war on women” as well as my own increased use of Gileadean metaphors led me to find myself poring over the pages of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which I’d already read twice, seeking explicit parallels between this world and today’s. Here’s what I discovered in Gilead:

Sanctioned murder of abortion providers, as the recent proposed law in South Dakota would have tacitly encouraged and as the neglect of clinic safety rules presages. Atwood’s language directly overlaps the rhetoric from today’s anti-choice extremists and their violent footsoldiers as she describes the public execution of former abortion providers:

“The men wear white coats, like those worn by doctors… each has a placard hung around his neck to show why he has been executed: a drawing of a human fetus. They were doctors, then, in the time before, when such things were legal…these men, we’ve been told, are like war criminals. It’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive. They have committed atrocities and must be made into examples, for the rest.”

Men’s “natural tendencies” as justification for the mistreatment of women. Evolutionary psychologists, take note. In Atwood’s novel, “The Commander” who is charged with impregnating Offred, tells her why there are secretly-sanctioned brothels for men like him: “Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan.” The Commander also uses men’s needs to explain why they created Gilead to begin with and eliminated freedom for women:

“The problem wasn’t only with the women… the problem was with the men. The sex was too easy… there was nothing to work for, to fight for.”

…God as the provider of an excuse to regulate women’s reproduction. Atwood is quite subtle in this, but the Commander’s use of “nature” to explain why men get more sexual privileges, while the Aunt’s use of Biblical standards of purity to teach women their new place, illustrates the double-standards that are in place today. Misogynists demand that men submit to their “natural” sex drive while women deny it and stay “pure” vessels for God’s gifts. In Atwoood’s world, women who can’t or won’t provide children because they’ve had their tubes tied are called “unwomen” and sent to their certain deaths in “the colonies.”

“’How could they’, said Aunt Lydia, ‘oh how could they have done such a thing? Jezebels! Scorning God’s gifts…’ ‘They said there was no sense in breeding.’ Aunt Lydia’s nostrils narrow: ‘such wickedness. They were lazy women,’ she says. ‘They were sluts.’”

This contrast of lazy, slutty women, and men ruled by nature leads us to the next parallel, the positioning rape as women’s fault. We see this constantly today, from the “forcible rape” provision in the H.R. 3 bill to the rape apology coming from law-enforcement in Toronto. Few who’ve read Atwood’s novel can forget the following scene, during which the women are being “reconditioned” by giving testimonials of their former lives:

“It’s Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion… But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger.  Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us. She did. She did. She did.  Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.

In Gilead, the only thing that can redeem women from their fallen state, of course, is procreation: pregnancy is seen as as “saving” sexually active women and providing their most crucial role in society. Offred describes shopping and running into another handmaid who is pregnant: “one of them is vastly pregnant…she’s a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire. We covet her. She’s a flag on a hilltop, showing us what can be done; we too can be saved.” This, of course is an echo of both the political currents which oppose birth control, and the twinned social obsessions with “baby bumps” and “sainted motherhood” which we experience in culture today. 

In the reproductive justice community, it’s commonly understood that behind the drive against abortion is a drive against birth control, women’s agency, and sex for its own sake. In Gilead, Offred’s experience with sex, at first, reflects these new rules which eliminate pleasure from sex and reduce it to its biological basics:

“What’s going on in this room.. has nothing to do with passion or love or romance or any of those other notions that we used to titillate ourselves with… it seems odd that women once spent such time and energy reading abut such things, thinking about them, worrying about them, writing about them. They are so obviously recreational.”

Readers of the book know that this lack of passion ends up affecting Offred’s choices even more than her lack of freedom does.

But this lack of personal freedom and passion doesn’t just hit enlightened women like Offred–it affects its own architects. In light of Bachmann and Palin-mania, another aspect of Gilead to remember is the fate of conservative women who made money telling other women to stay at home.  Atwood’s memorable character Serena Joy was modeled perhaps on Phyllis Schlafly, but who knew that a new generation of Schlaflys would gain even more power? Still, imagine what it would be like for Palin or Bachmann if they were bound by their own rules:

“Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all…she doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.”

It’s a chilling fate, even for one’s ideological opponents.

Of course, not every aspect of Atwood’s vision in “The Handmaid’s Tale” was prophetic or relevant to what’s happening right now, and her culture-warriors aren’t perfect extensions of today’s. It’s fiction, after all. But just as Orwell, Huxley’s and others dystopian visions allow us to measure how far our world has spun off the axis of rationality, so is Atwood’s vision an appropriate yardstick for measuring entrenched government misogyny. And sadly, the world she created with logic, imagination and writerly brilliance still has frightening resonance–not just to a world that could be, but to the world that we live in at this very moment.

An effort to defund Ohio Planned Parenthood affiliates by Gov. John Kasich (R) and the Republican-held legislature has come to an end.

Judge Michael R. Barrett of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Ohio on Friday ruled in Planned Parenthood’s favor, granting a permanent injunction on an anti-choice state law.

The court ruling will keep Richard Hodges, the Ohio Department of Health director, from enforcing HB 294.

The 2015 law, sponsored by Rep. Bill Patmon (D-Cleveland) and Rep. Margaret Conditt (R-Butler County), would have redirected $1.3 million in state and federal taxpayer funds from Planned Parenthood’s 28 clinics in Ohio.

The law would have required the state department to keep federal funds and materials that the health department receives from being distributed to entities that perform or promote non-therapeutic abortions, or maintain affiliation with any entity that does.

Funding that would’ve been cut off from the state health department went to the Violence Against Women and Breast and Cervical Cancer Mortality Prevention acts, the Infertility Prevention Project, Minority HIV/AIDS and Infant Mortality Reduction initiatives, and the Personal Responsibility Education Program.

Planned Parenthood in a lawsuit argued that the Republican legislation violated the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Barrett had temporarily blocked the law after Planned Parenthood affiliates filed the lawsuit and requested a preliminary injunction. The judge had issued an opinion contending that some legislators passed the law to make it difficult for people to access abortion care, as Rewire reported.

Iris E. Harvey, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, praised the judge’s temporary order.

“This law would have been especially burdensome to communities of color and people with low income who already often have the least access to care—this law would have made a bad situation worse,” Harvey said in a statement.

Kellie Copeland, NARAL Pro Choice Ohio’s executive director, said in a statement that the Ohio legislature passed the anti-choice measure in an effort to appeal to conservative voters in early primary states during Kasich’s presidential campaign.

Copeland said that while the legislation made no effort to reduce the number of abortions performed, “it actively blocked critical health care for low-income women and families.”

Planned Parenthood said those services included 70,000 free STD screenings, thousands of HIV tests for at-risk community residents, and the largest infant mortality prevention program in the state.

In the 23-page court order and opinion, Barrett, an appointee of President George W. Bush, acknowledged that the law would have deterred “patients from seeking these potentially life-saving services.”

Planned Parenthood noted that the recent ruling in Ohio makes it among the ten states where courts have blocked anti-choice laws following June’s landmark Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Bizarre and inflammatory rhetoric is nothing new for this election. In fact, the Republican presidential candidate has made an entire campaign out of it. But during a rally last Tuesday, Donald Trump sunk to a new level. He lamented that if Hillary Clinton is elected president in November, there will be no way to stop her from making judicial nominations.

He said, “By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

For a candidate marred by offensive comment after offensive comment, this language represents a new low, because, as many immediately explained, Trump appears to be making a veiled threat against Clinton, whether he had intended to or not.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called it a “death threat” and Dan Rather, former CBS Evening News host, called it a “direct threat of violence against a political rival.” Former President Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis said it was “horrifying,” and even the author of an NRA-linked blog initially tweeted, “That was a threat of violence. As a real supporter of the #2A it’s appalling to me,” before deleting the tweet as the NRA expressed support for Trump.

This kind of language is violent in nature on its face, but it is also gendered, following in a long line of misogynistic rhetoric this election season. Chants of “kill the bitch” and “hang the bitch” have become common at Trump rallies. These aren’t solely examples of bitter political sniping; these are overt calls for violence.

When women speak out or assert ourselves, we are challenging long-held cultural norms about women’s place and role in society. Offensively gendered language represents an attempt to maintain the status quo. We’ve seen this violent rhetoric online as well. That isn’t an accident. When individuals throw pejorative terms at those of who refuse to be silenced, they are attempting to render public spaces, online or on the campaign trail, unsafe for us.

There is no shortage of examples demonstrating how individuals who feel threatened by subtle power shifts happening in our society have pushed back against those changes. The interactions happening online, on various social media platforms, offer the most vivid examples of the ways in which people are doing their best to try to make public spaces as uncomfortable as possible for marginalized populations.

Social media offers the opportunity for those whose voices are routinely ignored to hold power in a new way. It is a slow but real shift from old, more traditional structures of privileging certain voices to a more egalitarian megaphone, of sorts.

For marginalized populations, particularly women of color and transgender women, social media can provide an opportunity to be seen and heard in ways that didn’t exist before. But it also means coming up against a wall of opposition, often represented in a mundane but omnipresent flow of hatred, abuse, and violent threats from misogynist trolls.

The internet has proven to be a hostile place for women. According to a report from the United Nations, almost three quarters of women online have been exposed to some form of cyber violence. As someone who has received threats of violence myself, I know what it feels like to have sharing your voice met with rage. There are women who experience this kind of violent rhetoric to an even greater degree than I could ever dream.

The list of women who have been inundated with threats of violence could go on for days. Women like Zerlina Maxwell, who was showered with rape threats after saying that we should teach men not to rape; Lindy West received hundreds upon hundreds of violent and threatening messages after she said that she didn’t think rape jokes were funny; Leslie Jones, star of Ghostbusters and Saturday Night Live, was driven off of Twitter after a coordinated attack of racist, sexist, and violent language against her.

And yet, rarely are such threats taken seriously by the broader community, including by those able to do something about it.

Many people remain woefully unaware of how cruel and outright scary it can be for women online, particularly women with prolific digital profiles. Some simply refuse to see it as a real issue, declaring that “It’s just the internet!” and therefore not indicative of potential physical violence. Law enforcement doesn’t even have a solution, often unwilling to take these threats seriously, as Amanda Hess found out.

This kind of response is reflected in those who are trying to defend Donald Trump after the seemingly indefensible. Despite the overwhelming criticism from many, including some renowned Republicans, we have also seen some Trump supporters try to diminish or outright erase the violent aspect of this clearly threatening rhetoric. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) and former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani have both said that they assumed Trump meant get rid of her “by voting.” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that it “sounds like just a joke gone bad.”

The violent nature of Donald Trump’s comments seem apparent to almost everyone who heard him. To try to dismiss it as a “joke” or insist that it is those who are offended that are wrong is itself harmful. This is textbook gaslighting, a form of psychological abuse in which a victim’s reality is eroded by telling them that what they experienced isn’t true.

But gaslighting has played a major role in Donald Trump’s campaign, with some of his supporters insisting that it is his critics who are overreacting—that it is a culture of political correctness, rather than his inflammatory and oppressive rhetoric, that is the real problem.

This is exactly what women experience online nearly every day, and we are essentially told to just suck it up, that it’s just the internet, that it’s not real. But tell that to Jessica Valenti, who received a death and rape threat against her 5-year-old daughter. Tell that to Anita Sarkeesian, who had to cancel a speech at Utah State after receiving a death threat against her and the entire school. Tell that to Brianna Wu, a game developer who had to flee her home after death threats. Tell that to Hillary Clinton, who is trying to make history as the first woman president, only to have her life threatened by citizens, campaign advisers, and now through a dog whistle spoken by the Republican presidential candidate himself.

Threats of violence toward women are commonplace on the internet for the same reason that they are increasingly common at Donald Trump’s rallies: They are effective at perpetuating violence against women as the norm.

Language matters. When that language is cruel, aggressive, or outright violent, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it doesn’t come without consequences. There is a reason that it is culturally unacceptable to say certain words like “cunt” and other derogatory terms; they have a history of harm and oppression, and they are often directly tied to acts of violence. When someone tweets a woman “I hope your boyfriend beats you,” it isn’t just a trolling comment; it reflects the fact that in the United States, more women are killed by intimate partners than by any other perpetrator, that three or more women die every day from intimate partner violence. When Donald Trump not only refuses to decry calls of violence and hate speech at his rallies but in fact comes across as threatening his female opponent, it isn’t just an inflammatory gaffe; it reflects the fact that one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence.

Threats of violence have no place in presidential campaigns, but they also have no place online, either. Until we commit ourselves to rooting out violent language against women and to making public spaces safer and more accommodating for women and all marginalized people, Trump’s comments are just par for the course.