The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

eight possible personalities and girls can have one, which is “high heel...

Club I learned that rage and degradation are the selling points of an alluring bad boy, not the red flags of an abuser (and the thing is I STILL WANT HIM). From pretty much all film and TV I learned that compli...

atavistic

Whatever your sphere is, however big or small, you get to make choices within it, and if you care about healing the wounds of the world I hope you become a real demon bitch about diversity and never let anyone sleep. Think radical thoughts and let yourself imagine they’re true. Then ask yourself why it’s considered radical to make art that accurately reflects reality, to build a society that takes care of its members, to demand a better world.

YES!!!

According to data compiled by 50/50 by 2020, a coalition of entertainment professionals fighting for intersectional equity in Hollywood, a staggering 94 percent of film executives are white, 96 percent of film directors are men, 76 percent of writers across all platforms are men, and 81 percent of board members in Hollywood are men. The 50/50 by 2020 manifesto reads, “Men have used patriarchy and white supremacy to create a reality that centers their own needs, normalizing our oppression. This must end.” We can bring reality back to reality if we change who makes the choices.

As the cheftestants have recently discovered—assuming that this is their first time on television—most of show business is waiting around while people with complicated belts move heavy things that you are not allowed to touch. Then, once every couple of hours, a lot happens, briefly. It doesn’t take very long on a set to figure out that, no, we’re not starting yet. Only dorks are rarin’ to go. Here Fieri springs his trap.

strange saxophone of a man

It is okay to like this dog and his bungling. This is a difficult time, and it is okay to go to another place once in a while. Donald Trump is not the president of Flavortown.

Twitter was aflame. The Washington Post ran an op-ed titled “BuzzFeed’s Hit Piece on Chip and Joanna Gaines Is Dangerous” (witch hunt!), which argued that attending a homophobic church is fine because lots of people in the United States are homophobic.

Come on, man, just disavow that shit! You’re killing us! We love the banter and the buns honking! Do it for the banter, or MAYBE DO IT FOR THE LGBTQ YOUTH SUICIDE RATES.

Now, it is true that it is good, potentially, to know and respectfully share ideas across cultural and political borders. It is not illegal to have bad, even evil, ideas, nor should it be. But there’s a reason why these memes are almost always made by white people about white people. It is not good or healing or compulsory for marginalized people to connect with those who disagree that they should get to be full human beings under the law.

Sidestepping reality—whether you genuinely believe in, say, conversion therapy or just don’t want to deal with some bullshit your pastor got you into—is choosing the lie. This is what I’ll never understand about that tactic: people are dying to forgive you if you just live in the truth.

Well, good! I’m glad this is uncomfortable for you!

It is not, as Chip wrote,

“throwing stones at each other” to point out that these things are incompatible with basic morality.

There is no value in willfully ignoring hatred, and the lie that neutrality in the face of oppression is not a political stance is part of how we got here.

People are not binary. We are not good or bad, saintly or irredeemable. There’s nothing wrong in asking for accountability and an acknowledgment of shared humanity from the people we admire, the people building the culture our children will grow up in, the people to whom we give our money. Who doesn’t want to be better? What—you want to stay bad or get worse out of spite?

but I don’t think it is interesting or sophisticated to mock people who do. The women in the hangar and in line for the shaman with me were having fun. They were sitting on pillows and connecting with one another. They were having the kind of spontaneously intimate conversation that happens among women all the time, dressed up in the language

of magic and, sure, monetized.

Maybe some of those were even the roots of the kinds of conversations we so desperately need to have: Oh,...

focused “on being and achieving the optimal versions of ourselves,” as Paltrow put it during her welcome address, cannot truly be depoliticized. You can’t honestly address “wellness”—the things people need to be well—without addressing poverty and systemic racism, disability access and affordable health care, paid family leave and food insecurity, contraception and abortion, sex work and the war against drugs and mass incarceration.

I heard that idea repeated over and over again at the Goop conference: take care of yourself so you can take care of others. Put your mask on first. Hold space for yourself. Be entitled. Take. At a certain point, it began to feel less like self-care and more like rationalization.

It is okay to love skin cream and crystals. It is normal and forgivable to be afraid of dying, afraid of cancer, afraid of losing your youth and beauty and the currency they confer. We have no other currency for women.

But the idea that anything is apolitical is an illusion accessible only to a very few. And the absolute least the Galadriel in chief ought to do is acknowledge that.

Taking a side against anything that happens on South Park

would mean taking a side, and, as we’ve learned, both sides are equally stupid. The only safe space is nihilism.

It’s a neat trap, which certainly does not sound like indoctrination at all. But. My friends. Both sides, inasmuch as there are two “sides,” are not equally stupid or equally bad. The notio...

They could have said libertarians, which are Republicans with sunglasses, but they said Republicans, specifically. “I hate conservatives,” Tierney quoted Stone as saying, “but I really hate liberals.” That, again, was 2001, when George W. Bush had just gone to war in Afghanistan—a war that, along with its fraudulent, for-profit spin-off, Iraq—would spend the next several decades forcing the children of impoverished Americans to massacre the children of impoverished brown people overseas. At the time, in those months after 9/11,

called “South Park Republicanism,” an ideology that we can easily recognize now as a sort of proto-alt-right—predominantly young white men who felt “bullied” by un-fun, po-faced liberals and chose to fight back not with vicious stereotyping and oppressive social programs like their GOP dads had done but with vicious stereotyping and irreverence (and tacit endorsement of oppressive social programs).

one thing clear, to shine a spotlight on this one specific idea: It is very important that people not feel this way.

earth. They are very, very bad! Similarly, sometimes Democrats ask you to respect people’s pronouns!

Republicans were bad before Trump, and they will still be bad when he is gone. It is objectively destructive to fetishize the past, to dismantle social safety nets, to deny the existence of structural inequalities and leave the most vulnerable to face impossible odds without succor. It is a fundamental betrayal of everything a society is for.

Yes, PETA sucks. A stopped clock and all that. But the South Park guys are not mad at PETA for the things that actually suck about PETA. They’re mad at PETA for being annoying, for caring too hard about animals (however imperfectly). This is not some new, cool strain of conservatism—nor is the alt-right. This is the same old stuff. It’s Morning in America. Make America Great Again. When I was a kid, “Save the whales” was a punch line, shorthand for those limp-wristed environmentalists, those tree people in their knitwear, always caring so annoyingly on your doorstep with their clipboards. Well, good news, jokers. We didn’t save the whales. They’re dying. Another victory for irreverence. Ha ha.

Perhaps nothing is more pathetic than a white millionaire dad sneering at the attempts of oppressed groups to articulate their daily grinding indignity and begging for that indignity to be seen.

I understand that the whole point of South Park is to bait me into writing exactly this essay—into such self-serious “offense,” but, sorry, if we let trolls dictate the parameters of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable and what’s taboo, we end up with Donald Trump as president.

There’s a type of person who thinks he’s getting away with something by not believing in anything. But not believing in anything is believing in something. It’s active, not passive. To believe

in nothing is to change nothing. It means you’re endorsing the present, and the present is a horror. And why wouldn’t a couple of straight white millionaire dads be invested in protecting the status quo? If they can do it under the guise of challenging the status quo, what better camouflage? Irreverence is the ultimate luxury item.

White net worth in my city is twenty times that of black net worth. If you are one of those people who believes that racism is a thing of the past, never existed at all, or is defined simply as one person being mean to another person, you are claiming that white people genuinely earn—through ability alone, because anything else would be a systemic advantage—twenty times as much as black people. White people are twenty times as good at their jobs, twenty times as skilled, twenty times as deserving. If you believe that, you are racist. That is racism. (Congratulations! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but 2019 is a great time for you guys.)

pathologically racist society. In the Annenberg study, despite obvious systemic inequalities of opportunity, 42 percent of artists were people of color. Despite everything (or perhaps because of it), American music is black music. The fact that a people who have a socioeconomic deficit of 1,000 percent still manage to dominate the American musical landscape (influentially, if not compensatorily) is a testament to what we are losing.

Right-wing propaganda has convinced even relatively intelligent people that we must “hear both sides” on moral no-brainers such as NAZIS = BAD. Left-wing gullibility, always seeking to do the right thing, falls for it every time.

How about anyone but the oppressed lifts a finger to change anything at all?

Sexism is a male invention. White supremacy is a white invention. Transphobia is a cisgender invention. So far, men have treated #MeToo like a bumbling dad in a detergent commercial: well intentioned but floundering, as though they are not the experts. You are the experts.

Our society has engineered robust consequences for squeaky wheels, a verdant pantheon from eye rolls all the way up to physical violence. One of the subtlest and most pervasive is social ostracism: coding empathy as the fun killer, consideration for others as an embarrassing weakness, and dissenting voices as out-of-touch, bleeding-heart dweebs (at best). Coolness is a fierce disciplinarian.

Yes, I know you do. Welcome. Getting yelled at and made fun of is where many of us live all the time. Speaking up costs us friends, jobs, credibility, and invisible opportunities we’ll never even know enough about to regret. I know there’s pressure

“I got to be in the room while Joan was processing Lena Dunham,” Guy told me. “Lena Dunham was this object of fascination for her, because here you had someone who in Joan’s eyes was certainly dumpier than she was, and she was successful but she wasn’t scared.”

Whether through a failure of imagination or will, or out of sheer pragmatism, Joan couldn’t see a Joan outside the system any better than I could imagine a liberated self at age fourteen. For nearly sixty years she propped up that structure as passionately as she denounced it, a willing caryatid who hated every ounce bearing down on her, spitting defiantly up at the lintel and counting the drips as profits.

“Joan felt so hurt by the world,” Guy told me. “She felt so certain that she didn’t have what it takes to be respected, and she was going to point out everyone else’s inadequacies because she was sure that hers were very evident.”

Joan was that old maid, that was her joke. She was, as she famously said, the “last girl in Larchmont.” She called herself ugly, fat, unfuckable—brutally honest about her worth in the eyes of a rigged society, but then, instead of fighting for us lost, last girls, she turned around and gave worse than she got. Men built the system, they run it, and we suffer (Joan was always clear on that), but if suffering’s our lot, the best we can do is climb to the top of the pile, figure out how to get paid, how to be the one. And so Joan climbed us and climbed us and climbed us until she died, still not at the top.

Or you could be Joan. You could kill those parts of yourself that hope for more. You could laugh along with your own dehumanization and agree that’s it’s okay because it’s “just a joke,” the sacred joke.

But it should always be our goal not to perpetuate what is inflicted upon us. Your pain may not be fair, but it’s yours.