The more I watch The Handmaid’s Tale, the more I realize that the most terrifying villain in Gilead isn’t Commander Fred or the Eyes.it’s Serena Joy Waterford. Watching Yvonne Strahovski play her over the seasons has been an absolute masterclass in psychological horror, mostly because her character arc is a brutal blueprint of how right-wing female hypocrisy works in the real world.
Serena is the ultimate example of a very specific, incredibly dangerous archetype: the ultra-conservative woman who passionately builds the cage for her own gender, genuinely believing that her intelligence, status, and loyalty will make her the exception to the rule. She didn't want a world where women were treated like livestock; she wanted a world where other women were treated like livestock, while she got to reign as the protected, untouchable matriarch. This delusion of exceptionalism is ultimately what destroys her, and it mirrors the exact same cognitive dissonance we see in real life conservative women who trade solidarity for proximity to patriarchal power.
Before the coup, Serena was a polished, media-savvy cultural warrior writing books like A Woman's Place, arguing that women should retreat from public life and surrender to male authority. The irony here is so thick it hurts, she used her massive public platform, her sharp intellect, and her immense agency to advocate for the eradication of women's voices.
It’s impossible to look at her early days and not see shades of real-life conservative icons like Phyllis Schlafly, who famously spent her life traveling the country and building a high-profile political career out of telling other women to stay at home and reject the Equal Rights Amendment. Like Schlafly, or contemporary right-wing female pundits who make millions hosting TV shows where they preach that a woman's highest calling is quiet domestic submission, Serena operates under the assumption that the rules apply to the masses, not the architects. She thought because she helped write the script for Gilead, she’d always have a seat at the table. She failed to realize that patriarchal authoritarians don't reward loyalty with equality; to them, a woman is just a tool, and once she serves her purpose, she is stripped of her utility.
The show does a brilliant job of methodically peeling back her privilege to show how this hypocrisy leads to her absolute undoing. The first massive reality check happens in Season 2 when she dares to read from the Bible in front of the Commander's council to try and protect baby Nichole's future. Her reward for that single act of independent thought? Her own husband, Fred, has her finger amputated.
You would think losing a literal piece of herself to the patriarchy would wake her up, but her commitment to her own exceptionalism is so deeply ingrained that she just pivots to a new angle of manipulation. By Season 3, she betrays Fred to the Americans, fully believing she can negotiate a cozy, wealthy lifestyle in Canada with a stolen baby. She genuinely thinks she is above the law, above morality, and immune to the consequences of her choices because she views her own desires as fundamentally superior to everyone else's.
But her poetic justice hits its peak in the later seasons when she gets trapped in a mirror image of the exact nightmare she designed. Watching her stay with the Wheeler family in Canada is wild because Alanis Wheeler treats Serena exactly how Serena used to treat June. Serena is slowly stripped of her autonomy, her diet is monitored, her movements are restricted, and she realizes she is being treated as nothing more than a vessel for her unborn son, Noah. When Serena finally panics, cries out for her basic human rights, and flees into the night with her baby, it exposes the absolute core of her hypocrisy. She never actually believed in the universal righteousness of Gilead’s values; she just thought she was immune to them.
This is exactly how women who align themselves with hyper patriarchal or fundamentalist movements operate in the real world. We see politicians and commentators constantly voting against reproductive healthcare, bodily autonomy, and workplace protections, knowing damn well that their own wealth and status will allow them to bypass those restrictions privately whenever they need to.
They think that by being "one of the good ones," the leopards won't eat their faces. But as Serena’s downfall perfectly illustrates, the system they feed is insatiable. Authoritarian patriarchy requires absolute submission, and it will always turn on the women who built it the second they express a single independent thought or age out of their utility. Serena ends up running as a terrified, powerless refugee, desperate to keep her child from the very system of forced adoption she codified into law. She thought she was the architect of the wall, but she was always just another brick destined to get crushed.