The parallels between Afghani women lives when the Taliban ruled their nation and the lives of different groups of women in The Handmaid's Tale are eerily abundant: Like Afghani women forced by law and the constant threat of violence, Atwood's Handmaids are forced into hiding, concealed within the shadow of the men to whom they were attached. The burqas that Afghani women had to wear were the literal sign of the stripping-away of their identities: They ceased to exist as complete humans, made literally faceless (Howells 54)
Babbitt's closest friend, Paul Riesling, kills his wife in the novel's greatest act of violence. This murder is not framed in the kind of explicitly gendered terms in which the bloodthirsty public slaughter of women is carried out in Gilead, it is clear from Lewis's tone that he understands with a trenchant clarity the costs that society placed on men by demanding such a high degree of conformity from them (Lewis 81)
Babbitt's closest friend, Paul Riesling, kills his wife in the novel's greatest act of violence. This murder is not framed in the kind of explicitly gendered terms in which the bloodthirsty public slaughter of women is carried out in Gilead, it is clear from Lewis's tone that he understands with a trenchant clarity the costs that society placed on men by demanding such a high degree of conformity from them (Lewis 81)
Ironically, of course (and this was no doubt an important impetus for Lewis in writing the novel) American fear of the kind of totalitarian governance that they were afraid would overtake them if the Soviet Union were to win the Cold War lead them to impose on themselves a voluntary totalitarianism. This is not to say that American intellectuals ever suffered the same kinds of horrors that Stalin and later Soviet leaders would inflict on political and artistic dissidents in their nation, but there was certainly a price to pay for those in Babbitt's (and Lewis's) world for those who spoke out (Lingeman 71)
Language is power. This is something that the Taliban certainly understood when they made it illegal for women to be educated (Rashid 41)