Last night, Saturday Night Live parodied Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale with a short sketch featuring a group of handmaids who come across a group of bros that they knew in their former lives. While the lives of the women (formerly known as Girl Squad) have drastically changed, the men’s lives haven’t.
Chris Pine’s stereotypical bro and a friend encounter the group of women, and only vaguely remember society drastically changing. Pine offers up a weak excuse: “I think I actually read something about that, but I’ve been super busy at work lately.” No matter how much the women try and explain what’s happened, it’s clear that the guys are aren’t really paying attention.
“You guys should like, fight back.”
Instead, they offer up some vague and extremely unhelpful suggestions: “You guys should like, fight back,” Pine’s bro friend says, while Pine says that they should drop his entertainment lawyer father an email, and is offended when one of the handmaids says that they can’t do that. It’s clear that they don’t actually care that much, even though one of them “meant to go” to that protest a while back. When the women are dragged off, they just shrug and complain that they’ll probably flake on their invitation to hang out.
It’s an entertaining sketch (Pine makes for a convincing bro, and SNL’s tagline for Hulu — “See Netflix, we have one, too” — is hilarious), but it’s uncannily true to life. There have been plenty of examples where men have been completely oblivious to the systemic problems that women face, and this sketch shows that the Republic of Gilead probably won’t be all that different.
