All female characters experience frequent low-grade sexual harassment and pervasive misogyny. This dystopia limits the number of words girls and women can speak per day, with cuffs to deliver electric shocks as an enforcement mechanism. The narrator refers to secondary female characters who have experienced domestic violence, which is implied to include sexual coercion. On a society-wide level, teens and young women are forced to choose between marriages arranged between their fathers and suitors,; being brothel sex slaves. Women and teens who have sex outside of a heterosexual marriage are brutally publicly shamed and sent to labor camps.