Meet Serena Joy, 'The Handmaid's Tale' Villain Behind Olivia Rodrigo's Most Outspoken Song

Olivia Rodrigo's surprise single 'Serena Joy' channels its anger through one of fiction's most divisive villains, using the story of a woman who helped build a totalitarian state, only to be trapped by it, to power what is being described as her most openly political song yet.

The track, released to raise money for reproductive rights groups including Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights, is already being framed as a sharp step into direct activism.

Serena Joy Waterford is a central antagonist in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale and its Hulu television adaptation.

A former Christian media personality, Serena Joy is the wife of Commander Fred Waterford and one of the key architects of Gilead, a religious extremist regime that strips women of their reproductive rights and basic freedoms.

The bitter irony of her character is that she ends up imprisoned by the very system she helped write into law.

Who Is Atwood's Serena Joy?

As a Commander's Wife, Serena Joy holds a privileged place in Gilead's hierarchy. She uses June Osborne, a woman forced into sexual servitude as a Handmaid, in the hope of having a child.

Yet the patriarchy Serena Joy endorsed ultimately turns on her. Once Gilead is fully established, her own rights are curtailed and her life is upended by laws she helped create. Over the course of the story, she experiences a crisis of faith and eventually aids June in assassinating members of Gilead's leadership.

While this character shift is a critical turning point in Atwood's novel, audiences of the Hulu adaptation responded to it differently. Many viewers grew frustrated with what they described as 'endless, undeserved redemption arcs' in the later seasons of the Hulu series.

Others argue she was never redeemed at all. She remained, in the words of one widely shared fan view, 'a monster who also had bad things happen to her'.

How 'Serena Joy' Confronts Complicity

Rodrigo never mentions Serena Joy or Gilead by name. Instead, she uses the character as a lens to examine complicity, wilful ignorance and the illusion of safety.

The opening lines establish the tone: 'Yeah, it's all for the cause / For the good of us all / And if you close your eyes / Then it can't be your fault.'

These echo the justifications used by Gilead's elite Wives, who looked away from the brutality on the streets while, as Rodrigo puts it, 'we're having a ball'.

The chorus delivers the song's central warning: 'If they do it to them / They'll do it to you'. It offers a direct parallel to Serena Joy's fate and a rebuke aimed at women who align with oppressive power structures in the belief that cooperation will protect them.

The bridge shifts the song's register from indictment to defiance: 'If you can't throw a punch / You can learn how to spit / And we'll never give up / And we'll never submit.'

Listeners have also noted a passage they interpret as a real-world political reference: 'Here's a tower we built / Painted gold on the walls.' Elsewhere, lines such as 'Come in close, come in close / Sing along, sing along / What they tell you to do' are read as the voice of an unreliable narrator coaxing Serena Joy to fall into line.

500 CDs, Five Charities

'Serena Joy' was released as a surprise digital single, with net proceeds directed to Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields Fund, which supports the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood, the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the National Women's Law Center, the Center for Indigenous Health and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Five hundred limited-edition 'Serena Joy' CDs were released at an independent record shop in Tustin, California, three days before the track's global streaming release. The entire run sold out within hours, with proceeds also helping raise early funds for the Daisy Chain Fields Fund supporting reproductive rights and healthcare organisations.