Older, non-fertile women are sent to radioactive reserves, while fertile women are used as illicit liaisons for the rich. But women are not just baby-making machines. In the novel, feminists protest for their freedom of sexuality and femininity: "The camera moves to the sky, where hundreds of balloons rise, trailing their strings: red balloons, with a circle painted on them, a circle with a rod like the rod. of an apple, the stem of a cross” (Chapter 20). Here, the balloons represent freedom and are marked with the feminine symbol painted on them. Additionally, Atwood associates the feminine symbol with the cross, meaning that spiritual beings give the same respect to women as they do to men. Women today are angry about the lack of freedom of their bodies and about being treated as inferior to men. In one instance, Offred compares the black, burned pages of a burning magazine to a woman's body: “I threw the magazine into the flames. It opened in the wind of its combustion; large flakes of paper broke away, floating in the air, still on fire, parts of women's bodies were transformed into black ashes, in the air, before my eyes” (chapter 7). Here, Atwood uses the magazine to convey the slow destruction of female freedom and fertility. Furthermore, Offred describes the burning of the magazine as having happened "before her eyes", thus separating herself from younger generations of women who did not live in a world before the new "transformation". In other words, women will continue to fight for their rights and equality, as they do today. Offred's dystopian world shows the inevitable path if we want to continually repress and deny women.