Serena Joy vs Actual Joy

(spoiler alert, Serena Joy is an entitled Karen)

It took me nearly an entire year, but I finally finished the fifth season of the Hulu series, “The Handmaid’s Tale” based on the novel by Margaret Atwood. If you’re not all caught up, you may want to stop reading because there will be a couple of spoilers. 

Season five opens with a handful of the handmaids celebrating the vigilante justice they delivered to Commander Waterford, leaving his wife, Serena Joy Waterford, widowed AND pregnant. Through a series of events, the character, June Osborne (formerly Handmaid Offred Waterford), helps Serena Joy deliver a healthy baby boy. In a barn (lots of symbolism in this show). They get her to a hospital to make sure mother and baby are thriving, but June’s husband, Luke, called immigration on Serena Joy, who is an undocumented citizen from Gilead (oh the irony!). 

Because of this, she essentially gets “placed” into a household and is expected to relinquish her baby to the couple, and act only as a nanny/nursemaid, just like Serena Joy and the Commander did to June (after they repeatedly raped her, of course). 

Lo and behold, Secular Fam! Serena Joy did NOT like that, so she escaped. The final scene of season five is of Serena Joy and June running into each other in a train filled with refugees. 

Whew. 

It is not an easy show to watch, but I wanted to be ready to watch the sixth and final season, coming out sometime in the spring of 2025. When I read the book in high school, that book hit me hard, but I scoffed at it, thinking, “This could never happen in America.” 

Yet, here we are.

Because Margaret Atwood has been a consulting producer, the extended series-version of her novel is damn good. The casting is incredible, and the characters who play the Commanders’ wives and the “Aunts” (the women who beat and brainwash the Handmaids into submission) remind me of a certain group of women who also uphold the patriarchy. 

Though Serena Joy helped usher in an authoritarian “Christian” theocracy, she quickly became a victim of it. Her abusive, rapist husband even cut off her finger to teach her a lesson at one point. After she got everything she thought she wanted, she lost her own autonomy, and made it her mission to make sure no other woman would have autonomy either. It’s a tale as old as time, and one that we’re watching happen in real time.

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It got me thinking about Actual Joy vs Serena Joy. 

All these “joyful warriors of Christ” don’t experience actual “joy,” they experience “Serena joy.” People who are Serena Joy-ful find joy in controlling, belittling, and marginalizing others. People who experience Actual Joy find joy in helping others, serving their community, and spending time with family and friends.

People who are Serena Joy-ful attend their school board meetings and attack everyone who doesn’t conform to their narrow view of the world. People who are Actually Joyful celebrate their local schools by meeting the needs of the families that live there in meaningful ways. 

I got all caught up on the Handmaid’s Tale just in time for a local Commanders’ Wives & Aunts Meeting at the Peoria Unified School District (PUSD) board meeting on September 12, 2024. It just so happened to coincide with the district’s regular governing board meeting. 

I arrived around 5:30, and there was quite a crowd of people there. There was also a Danish journalist and her crew. The journalist that attended is Signe Molde-Amelung, and from what I can tell, she is a very well-known celebrity in Denmark. She seemed to know PUSD board candidate Janelle Bowles, the sister of Arizona’s own J6 Insurrectionist, second-to-last vote-getter in the CD8 congressional primary, Fake Elector, Arizona’s Biggest Manbaby AND Mama Fratelli Look Alike, (almost former) Senator Anthony Kern (R-LD27). 

She asked to interview me, so I agreed. I got the vibe that she knew both Bowles and Tamra Farah, who according to her Xitter profile is the “Director, SMART Families Network with @azwomenofaction | Guest on Fox News. Victory Channel. Real Americas Voice. Newsmax | Columnist @townhallcom.”

Since she kept looking at them and mentioning their names, I wasn’t exactly sure what her documentary would look like, but she said that it’s about book bans. I dug into her Instagram, and she doesn’t seem to be radical one way or the other, but I did find this post from last fall:

The title, translated, is “What is Sex?” and in the comments, people stated how they used this book to coax reluctant readers to read. Y’all, like it or not, sex is a great motivator to get kids to read. You know how I got my 9th graders interested in Shakespeare? By pointing out all the references to sex and interpreting the bawdy language. Works like a charm!

She’s actually quite funny and raw on her Instagram, and I found another post that had a direct Arizona connection. 

I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything about when this documentary will be released, but for now, it’s time to descend into the depraved depths of the Serena Joy-ful. As has become the norm in PUSD, this meeting was crawling with Commanders’ Wives and Aunts. Many of them were wearing campaign t-shirts and several were carrying signs from Ms. Farah’s SMART “Schools for Merit Academics & Respect for Truth” Families Network. 

Holy whistle words! Her group ALWAYS harps about our “failing public schools.” When they talk about “merit” they mean “nO AfFiRmAtIvE AcTiOn” or DEI initiatives. When they say “respect for truth” they mean they only want their narrow, privileged worldview taught in classes. It’s like when they say “woke” instead of just saying “n-word lover” because generally speaking, that language is frowned upon. 

Back in the 2000s, when families began fleeing their traditional public schools because of “school choice,” for a lot of those families it meant “I can’t possibly let my snowflake attend a school with ‘those’ kids.” The podcast, Nice White Parents, goes through the entire, racist history of “school choice.” I highly recommend it. 

Speaking of nice white parents, let’s get back to PUSD. There were a couple of items on the agenda I was worried about, and a bunch of nice white parents have been targeting a guidance counselor at Ironwood High School on their social media platforms.

This educator ordered a bunch of books from GLSEN Arizona’s Rainbow Libraries Initiative. This initiative “aims to make Arizona school communities safer and more inclusive by providing LGBTQ+ centered, racially diverse, multicultural, and multilingual book sets available to K-12 schools and community libraries - for free.”

This sounds great! It’s inclusive, compassionate, and educational! BUT! It’s an initiative that acknowledges that LGBTQ+ people exist and live amongst us, so of course, the nice white parents hate it. Because their straight, white, gun-toting, American version of Jesus teaches them to be hateful bigots, they HATE when educators foster empathy in their classrooms. 

There was another item on the agenda that I had my eye on, and it was a “no-cost [emphasis mine] extension of the US Department of Education’s Mental Health Professionals Demonstration (MHPD) Grant.” This extension would allow the district to use funds that already belong to them [emphasis mine] in order to continue “employment for the existing grant funded employees through June 30, 2025.” 

This is a no-brainer, right? It doesn’t cost the district any additional funding. It ensures employment for three human beings and their interns, and helps countless families in the district who maybe don’t look quite like the nice white parents who continue to hold this community hostage. 

So of course, they rejected it. Well, half the board rejected it. 

These meetings are always live streamed, but at this meeting, they were having sound issues, so I’m glad I actually went in-person, otherwise, this vote would have been impossible to understand. I mean, I still don’t understand AT ALL who in their right mind would reject this NO COST extension, but I’m starting to think these folks might not be in their right minds at all.

This meeting was painful to watch, and I’m still processing how this will affect the employees and families that will be affected. This isn’t the first time that PUSD has turned down free funding. You may remember that they rejected a partnership with Microsoft because, essentially, it was too “woke.”

I was really hoping that President Becky Proudfit would prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable students in her district, but she cited her personal experience with her child to reject it, right after she said that she wouldn’t use her own personal experience to make decisions. I know this doesn’t make any sense, and I want to dig into the arguments of the Serena Joys and Aunt Lydias in the audience, so I think this Substack needs to be a two-parter.

In the meantime, I hope everyone here has a wonderful weekend, and even better, I hope you’re working to support good candidates in your district. This work is NOT easy, so if you appreciate these updates, please show us by becoming a member or becoming a paid subscriber today. 

Part two will come out sometime next week, Secular Fam.