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Please keep comments to these chapters. Warning: There will be spoilers.

I wonder, is anyone in this society actually happy? Serena is miserable because she's sharing her husband with a stranger, the Commander is miserable because he cannot have a close relationship with his wife, Offred is miserable for many many reasons. Again I'm wondering how all of this happened if no one wanted it? Who does this arrangement benefit?

I also want to know how the society replenishes itself. I get the impression that social and financial status had something to do with what role you took in the new society. But if the women who are having the children are giving the children to the wealthier husbands and wives, who will the next generation of red women be? Which niche will they come from? It seems like Offred had some choice in what she became in the new society. Will the next generation also have a choice?

I think that once the population has been replenished sufficiently, the red women might not even be required. And then there are people of lower class or financial status (who have econo-wives), their offspring I think will continue to be the same, or they might become the next generation of red women. As far as Offred having a say in what she wants to be, I got the idea that it's not her choice, she was lucky to have viable ovaries otherwise she might have met some terrible fate like other less lucky women.

That's my problem with most dystopian books today. They are so bleak and horrible that as a reader I can't help questioning how it happened and why the people allow it to continue. Though, I am finding this one more believable than others. I don't get the feeling that it happened overnight. I'm not sure what I would've thought of this book if I had read it when I was younger. But I'm not the same person as I was twenty years ago and this isn't the same world as then. I'm not as idealistic. And I now realize that freedoms are much easier to lose than I had once thought.

deleted user wrote: "That's my problem with most dystopian books today. They are so bleak and horrible that as a reader I can't help questioning how it happened and why the people allow it to continue."

Oddly enough, the older I get, the more plausible I find it. How many things do we see today that we just kind of let go and ignore, while more and more freedoms quietly slip away? It's not out of the question for it to happen (it's happened within the last 100 years in other countries, after all!) and that's why it's so scary. I find this scarier reading than any Stephen King novel.