The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

for rapes! It has the power to transform pretty much any credible accusation against a man into an unfair—nay, unconstitutional—and unfounded smear campaign. Accused of racism? Witch hunt! Accused of undermining the integrety of democracy itself? Witch hunt! Accused of willfully letting children die in concentration camps on the southern border of the United States? A pure, unadulterated, hysterical, bitchy witch hunt!!!

sorting women’s bodies into property and trash and “good” guys, average guys, guys you know, guys you love, guys on the Today show, going along with it. Snickering. Licking a boot here and there, joining in if they’re feeling especially bitter or transgressive or insecure or far from the cameras that day. Perhaps, at their most noble, staying silent. Never speaking up, because the social cost is too high.

Donald Trump is rape culture’s blathering id, and just a few days after the Access Hollywood tape dropped, then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) was required to stand next to him on a stage for a presidential debate and remain unflappable while being held to an astronomically higher standard and pretend that he was her equal while his followers persisted in howling that sexism is a feminist myth.

Setting aside the fact that a touch or a sex act cannot be both consensual and non-consensual, how much can any population with little institutional power really be said to “let” themselves be victimized by the powerful? Systemic inequality makes choice an illusion.

agita

I’m sorry to say it, but you just might

have to tiptoe through the minefield for a while. We’re tearing down old systems, but we haven’t built new systems yet. (Feeling uncomfortable at work? What’s that like?)

Who knows how people are going to talk about meat eaters in two hundred years?

itself, and Americans love to eat those lies up—anything that obliterates our sins, that tells us everything will be okay, that makes us the infallible, gallant protagonist in the story of Earth. We must root out the assumptions we swallow as fact and the facts we deny. We must not just examine but actively counter the disastrous, narcissistic death grip of mediocre white men on our past century’s art, media, and politics. We must start telling true stories about who we are, who is free and who is not, what we are doing to the planet.

We will not go back. It’s the lifting of a veil, the opposite of a glamour. We have to be the witches they’ve always said we are, and

counter their magic with our own. So fine, if you insist. This is a witch hunt. We’re witches, and we’re hunting you.

Maybe the only thing to do, when you are one speck in an ungovernable community of nearly eight billion people on this planet, is to always keep an eye trained on the deep why of things: Why do I like this? Where is this impulse coming from? Am I telling the truth to myself about myself?

Bub is a benign example of our propensity to flatten our objets d’entertainment into mascots, trading cards, so we can consume them without the complications of flesh and blood and history (remember 2011’s Homeless Man with the Golden Voice?),

I want to quickly mention that what follows is my own personal conspiracy theory and I don’t know shit. But also, unrelatedly, I am very smart.

deniability. If we can’t even think critically about something as relatively insignificant as an internet cat or admit that a person might give a pet an offensive name or apologize honestly for small,

careless slights, how are we ever going to reckon with the fact that our country was built by slaves on land stolen from people on whom we perpetrated a genocide? What the fuck are we going to do? Our propensity for always,

always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and ...

How did such a conglomerate of transparent bigots achieve enough mainstream credibility to win the White House? Well, because they said, over and over, that they weren’t bigots—the “nu-uh” defense.

And people believed them or pretended to because it was easier, because the alternative meant admitting some complicity in four centuries of American horrors. But my taxes are too high. But Michael Brown was no angel. But I’m not racist. But I like the cat.

When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America’s ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years.

White Americans hunger for plausible deniability and swaddle themselves in it and always have—for the sublime relief of deferred responsibility, the soft violence of willful ignorance, the barbaric fiction of rugged individualism. The worst among us have deployed it to seduce and herd the vast, complacent center: It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. You earned everything you have. Benefiting from genocide is fine if it was a long time ago. The scientists will figure out climate change. The

cat’s name is Tard...

If we’re going to pull our country and our planet back from the brink, we have to start living in the truth. We have to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.

We escape into home renovation shows because it’s easier to imagine an apolitical world where everyone can afford a house than it is to actually build that world. We gobble up cable news’ insistence that both sides of an argument

are equally valid and South Park’s insistence that both sides are equally stupid, because taking a firm stand on anything opens us up to criticism. We live willingly within the lies constructed by abortion opponents, enforcing shame and stigma around a basic human freedom, because we’re afraid to say the word abortion out loud. We kept letting Adam Sandler make more mo...

We cannot protect women from intimate partner violence until we stop treating battered wives as discrete hourlong plotlines instead of interconnected points on a millennia-long continuum. We cannot achieve racial equality until we stop giving twenty-two-year-old male comedians who believe in “reverse racism” as much credence in the “discourse” as we give black scholars and academics. We...

building without it will ...

execution? Often, when I hear men speak about home invasion, it’s not in the context of what an intruder might do to them but rather, in an almost fetishistic way, what they might do to an intruder.

Much like Ada Lovelace, the inventor of the fucking computer.

What?

Watching otherwise rational human beings rhapsodize about Bundy’s “charm” and “brilliance” while furrowing their brows over Elizabeth Warren’s dubious “likability” creates a particularly American kind of whiplash.

Ted Bundy was a mediocre student whom no one liked who failed at everything he ever tried to do except for exploiting women’s socialization as caregivers in order to put them into vulnerable situations so he could take away

their one single precious exquisite life. Elizabeth Warren put herself through Rutgers Law School with a toddler at home, held endowed professorships at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and Harvard Law School, became perhaps the most influential expert on bankruptcy law in the country, has been a US senator since 2012, and is now arguably the most principled and policy-driven candidate in the fight to wrest power from a profligate dictator and lead Americans to help save our dying planet. Ugh, off-putting! I hate it when my mommy makes me brush my teeth! Far more likeably, Ted Bundy pretended to have a broken arm so he could rape, bludgeon, shoot, and stab women.

He seems to be, to put it charitably, barely alive. If we’re all made of star stuff, he’s from the butt part of the star.

Sorry to be a mean bitch, but I am so fucking sick—FUCKING VIOLENTLY ILL—of having to watch good people be conned by smug simpletons who couldn’t beat a dog at Candyland. Ted Bundy and Billy McFarland are both more charming than Donald Trump, and that boner pratfalled his way into becoming the most powerful man on earth. That guy? That guy is who brought us down?

Institutional benefit of the doubt is monstrously powerful: any lie becomes an incantation, conjuring itself into truth. This is the foundation of Donald Trump’s power.

You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don’t feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Take care of yourself.

I wonder how many of the women Bundy murdered would have made good lawyers. I wonder how many female and minority lawyers Judge Cowart mentored in his lifetime.

Is there such a thing as a likable woman? Can you think of one?

And if she exists, could she be anything but the ultimate manifestation of everything we hate about the water we swim in, everything we’re forced to be? Likability in a sexist, racist culture is not objective—it’s compulsory femininity, the gender binary, invisible labor, whiteness, smallness, sweetness. It’s letting them do it.

If someone is universally likable, I don’t trust that person. That’s the...

So no, excuse me, we will not play likability anymore. It’s an endless runner—a game with no progress and no finish line—that women are expected to chase, that keeps us from doing the real work, accruing the real power. Chasing likability has been one of women’s biggest setbacks, by design. I don’t know that rejecting likability will get us anywhere, but I know that embracing it has gotten us nowhere.

“Witch” is something we call a woman who demands the benefit of the doubt, who speaks the truth, who punctures the con, who kills your joy if your joy is killing. A witch has power and power in women isn’t likable, it’s ugly, cartoonish. But

to not assert our power—even if we fail—is to let them do it. This new truth telling, this witchcraft of ours, by definition cannot be likable. We cannot pander or wait for consensus; the world is too big and complicated and rigged. We are saying the things tha...

Someone will always pop up to say, “You would be more effective if you were nicer.” “You would have a more receptive audience if you adjusted your tone.” “You catch more flies with honey.” Well, I don’t want flies. The mos...

But people always miss the number one most typical classic one weird trick about millennials, which is that older millennials like me, people who were born during Ronald Reagan’s first term, have a singular great, passionate love above all else. Greater than avocado toast, greater than the DuckTales theme, greater than gender-swapped Game of Thrones characters reimagined as Disney princesses, greater than never owning property, greater than selling our plasma so we can make our student loan payments, greater even than being called a special snowflake for asking not to be raped by future Supreme Court justices.

was that some women are flawless and tiny-boned like porcelain nightingales, and the rest of us are lonely, caustic basket cases in vintage dresses

who make jokes to cover up our anxiety about having to go to the AIDS clinic. The nightingales get picked; we get settled for, if that.

Maybe that makes me sound stupid, but media is so strong. Media overpowers our conscious minds, no matter how hard we try to hang on—our knowledge of what is right, who has an agenda, what we are really worth. Marketing is powerful and beauty culture is powerful and men’s control of the narrative is powerful and a lot of people are making a lot of money teaching us that we live in an unshakable natural hierarchy that bestows peace only upon those who achieve a narrow, subjective (and heavily monetized) version of p...

Growing up, I didn’t chafe at the shallow, exploitative representations of my gender I saw on-screen; I took notes. I added page after page to my mental list of how to be a woman and what I should yearn for (any attention, good or bad) and tolerate (anything short of viol...

From makeover shows I learned that I was ugly. From romantic comedies I learned that stalking means he loves you and persistence means he earned you, and also that I was ugly. From Disney movies I learned that if I made my waist small enough, a man or large hog-bear might marry me and let me sit quietly in his castle until death. From sitcoms I learned that it’s a wife’s job to...