Hillary Clinton seems to be on a roll. The day after she blamed her electoral defeat on FBI Director James Comey and the Russians via Wikileaks, she addressed a celebration thrown by Planned Parenthood and made a reference to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian novel that was recently made into a TV series on Hulu. According to the Washington Examiner, Clinton said "Now, I am not suggesting this dystopian future is around the corner, but this show has prompted important conversations about women's rights and autonomy. In ‘The Handmaid's Tale,’ women's rights are gradually, slowly stripped away.

As one character says, 'We didn't look up from our phones until it was too late.'"

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” for those who are not into literary dystopian fiction, is set in a future America where women are reduced to being sex slaves to the elite, are savagely punished if they step out of line, including female genital mutilation, and gay people, abortionists, and other undesirables are hanged summarily. Oddly, the story is not set in a future in which ISIS (which does all of those things currently) has taken over the United States, but rather when a cabal of religious Christians triumph over democracy. Back in the 1980s, when the novel was first published, the big bad was the Moral Majority. Now, with the series on Hulu, the villain is Donald Trump or, considering that he has the reputation of a libertine, Vice President Mike Pence.

The members of Planned Parenthood are certainly opened to being terrified that they are just a few days away from either being strung up or be raped by politicians and captains of industry while being forced to wear red nun’s habits. The organization is not very popular with conservatives as it is one of the primary providers of abortion in the United States.

The recent revelations that Planned Parenthood is selling fetal body parts to laboratories has not exactly burnished the organization’s reputation. Planned Parenthood’s racist origins as a way to stop people from certain ethnic groups from having babies is something not often mentioned by its supporters.

In any case, “The Handmaid’s Tale” makes for a boring and depressing dystopia unless one is a feminist who likes being terrified.

Much more entertaining future hell societies involve attractive teenagers being forced to fight to the death for the amusement of the adults. There is a conspicuous lack of gladiatorial combat in the Republic Of Gilead, the future America in the story. That lack would seem to make the continued success of the novel to be a puzzlement.