On last night’s episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, the new world learned the real name of Offred, who had been renamed “of Fred” to signify the Commander she serves. She asserted, “My name is not Offred. I have another name, which nobody uses now because it is forbidden.” Unlike June, “Lola” (nee Eudocia) from the Atlantic article did not get to tell us her story and when it was told it was to sell magazines and make a dude’s credentials better. Eudocia didn’t even get ownership of her own damn story—this is why many women in our circles cannot get through reading this piece. There was never an apology to her family. It shows that story telling only goes so far. To say that the author gave her agency, is to assuage our own guilt. How is this any different from The Help? We should not center our struggles around coming to terms with our own privilege. We must instead, in the words of Ninotchka Rosca, end these practices which “served at one point as poverty escape valves – but became rife with abuses and exploitation.” To do this, we will have to fight a hard battle against capitalism to “entitle everyone to free education, free health care, free housing, etc., because when the most basic of human rights is monetized, then we have slavery -- from outright slavery in banana plantations to individualized slavery in the household to wage slavery.” Childcare must be socialized. We must simultaneously fight against patriarchy and white supremacy because these basic human rights must not be distributed on any racial or gendered axis. This will require a transnational feminist movement. Look to the organizations that are doing the actual work to build it. We are glad that this article disrupted our innocence and exposed our big Filipino secret: a present-day caste system of “helpers” whose lives cannot leave the orbit of the richer. It was a visceral indictment of Filipino culture. We have to own that. It is time to say, “I am complicit.” It is absolutely unacceptable that we continue to funnel millions of women into household work as the end-all point of their lives. Housework should not be the ultimate destiny for poor women of color. Work inside the home, while it can be made decent, is numbing, repetitive, and brutal to the human spirit and body. In the worst cases, women report wearing three or four pairs of underwear at night to guard against rape, a common occupational hazard when the power balance is so askew. We refuse the term “domestic worker” for the same reasons we refuse “sex worker.” We must destroy our patriarchal relationship to sex and household, not enter them, because all women have the right to dream. - #AF3IRMHAWAII