When art holds up a mirror to the world, the reflection can be startling. For years, people have watched stories like The Handmaid’
When art holds up a mirror to the world, the reflection can be startling.
For years, people have watched stories like The Handmaid’s Tale—where a fictional society strips women of their names, their choices, and their autonomy—and called it a chilling warning of what could happen. But for so many women, particularly Black and other Indigenous women, that story wasn’t a prediction. It was a history book. It was an acknowledgment of a reality they had already lived through and, in many ways, are still navigating today.
Art is a beautiful teacher because it gives us a vocabulary for things we feel but can’t always spot in the wild. We are out here trying to survive.
But the danger of watching a dramatic story on a screen is that it makes the villains easy to spot. It makes it easy to point a finger at the obvious tyrants or to scapegoat the specific women in the story who choose to act as the regime’s brutal enforcers.
In real life, how women are pushed into compliance is much quieter. It is rarely a dramatic, overarching authority figure forcing the issue; it is a lateral whisper. It’s the way we, as women, can unconsciously turn on one another to keep a system running.
We see this play out in culture all the time. We watch it happen with public figures, in workplaces, and within our own families. A woman steps out of line, speaks a truth that makes the room uncomfortable, or refuses to play a traditional role, and suddenly the heaviest pressure to conform doesn’t come from the men at the top. It comes from the women right next to her.
The Anatomy of the Trap: Why it’s Lateral, Not Just Generational
The institution rarely has to enforce its own rules directly because it designs a system where women feel forced to police other women just to secure a baseline of safety for themselves or their daughters.
This isn’t about a lack of solidarity; it’s about a calculated structural setup. The institution creates an environment of artificial scarcity—of safety, of resources, of respect—and then offers a tiny, conditional sliver of protection to those who enforce the status quo.
We have to have the grace and the clarity to look at why that happens without turning to the reliable go-tos—”the older generation” or labeling individual women as the enemy for generations of oppression that stretches far and wide. If those folks weren’t around the stifling structure would still thrive.
When a society is structured around male benefit and dominant power, it creates an environment of artificial scarcity. It subtly teaches women that their baseline safety, their reputation, and their peace are entirely conditional.
And that is where the trap snaps shut.
Because this betrayal is lateral, it means none of us are automatically immune to it. It requires an active, ongoing self-audit. It’s not just about pointing at the obvious “enforcers” in our families or organizations; it’s about looking at our own daily interactions.
When a woman pushes her peer, her friend, or a younger girl to “just go along with it,” to soften her tone, to ignore her discomfort, or to sit down and be quiet, she isn’t usually acting out of malice. She is often acting out of a deeply ingrained survival instinct.
In her mind, she is teaching the next generation the hidden rules required to stay safe and unbothered inside a world that doesn’t center them or protect them even if she’s a “good girl.”
The deep tragedy of this dynamic is that our individual survival strategies quietly morph into institutional benefit and furtherance of what is already oppressing us.
We miss how often we do this. We miss how we monitor other women and girls into compliance because we are looking outward at the big, obvious structures of oppression instead of passing by mirrors.
Checking ourselves has to become a daily spiritual practice. We have to ask the quiet questions in the privacy of our own hearts:
Am I asking another woman to compromise her boundaries just because her discomfort makes the room tense?
Am I telling a woman to dim her light or swallow her truth under the guise of “protecting” her?
Am I protecting the comfort of a system because I’ve tied my own sense of safety to its stability?
The moment we require another woman’s compliance or silence as a prerequisite for our support, we are running the exact playbook designed to keep us divided. silenced, oppressed, and under (his) foot.
True solidarity isn’t about demanding that everyone navigate a broken system perfectly. That will not happen.
It’s about committing to a practice where we refuse to act as the enforcers of anyone else’s containment. It means creating spaces where a woman’s safety and belonging are completely guaranteed, whether she chooses to conform or chooses to shake the room.
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