The New SCOTUS Handmaiden of the Patriarchy

4 min readOct 28, 2020

October 28, 2020, 1:38 am
Filed under: American, anger, feminism, resistance | Tags: Amy Coney Barrett, feminism, handmaid, patriarchy, SCOTUS, sexism, Supreme Court, The Heritage Foundation

Warning: This post is going to be a little bit crude. I find the proceedings in the Senate to be very crude, so this is nothing compared to that — but if crude language isn’t for you, this might be one to skip.

Hey everybody — the Heritage Foundation would like you to know that Amy Coney Barrett is NOT a handmaid for patriarchy. I saw a headline from them saying as such when I googled her name and “Handmaid for the Patriarchy” because I was sure someone had already written this piece and found the Heritage Foundation’s headline instead. And we should all trust that the Heritage Foundation knows about these things, right? That Conservative Fundamentalist Think Tank wouldn’t say something like that if it wasn’t true, right?

The fact is — The Heritage Foundation, while being a great representation OF the Patriarchy, does not know what the Patriarchy is — and certainly does not understand how Barrett is, in fact, absolutely a handmaiden for it.

Is she literally a handmaiden in the Margaret Atwood Handmaid’s Tale Style? Apparently not. So. The good news is that she does not seem to have to engage in those weird ritualistic sexual practices. But — in the sense of a handmaid being in service to the greater patriarchal Judeo-Christian concept? Girl is a full-on handmaid, y’all. This is a woman who, even when being screwed by the patriarchy, was like, “Thank you! Would you screw me again? And might I help screw over the other women in this plan you have?”

Truthfully, if we used Atwood’s story to compare her to the characters of Gilead, she would be more Serena Joy and Aunt Lydia than a handmaiden. But outside of Atwood’s structure, a handmaiden is one who helps, one who is at the service of, and Barrett is 100% at the service of Patriarchy. That’s why she was selected. She looks the part. She does what the patriarchy expects. She makes decisions based on what the patriarchy would want her to do. She even giggles when a Senator asks her who does the laundry at home. She is there to serve.

And not to serve the country. Or the law. Or the Constitution. Or any of those things that it is, in fact, noble to serve. No, no matter how much she fetishizes the original constitution and its founding fathers, she is there to serve the mother fucking patriarchy and the mother fucking patriarchy is jizzing all over itself to be able to put her where they want her.

I haven’t paid her confirmation hearings much notice to be honest. It is too disgusting and crude and she’s just a blank. As a longtime handmaid of the patriarchy, she has long ago stripped away any sense of a real self. She has done everything she can to become an archetype of everything. She is The Mother, The Wife, The Christian Woman and somehow, improbably, The Judge.

And by being an archetype of everything, she is, in fact, nothing of substance. She is as blank as the notepad she proudly held up in her hearing.

A lot of people have been asking what I think of her. And the fact is that I do not think of her at all. To me she is a void. She’s a patriarchal placeholder. I understand her purpose. She is there to serve the patriarchy, to give it what it wants, to help it seize control of women’s bodies, to help it strip rights away from anyone the white patriarchal capitalist machine deems “other.” She is a blank because she is a handmaiden. She is OF the Patriarchy. She barely has a name.