The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

It seems that a lot of men are confusing being asked not to violate other people’s sexual boundaries with being forbidden to participate in basic human activities such as dancing, dating, chatting, walking around, going to work, and telling jokes.

I think we can all agree that this fully checks out and that, indeed, it is men who are the true victims of witch hunts. Which they invented. To kill women.

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 kept letting Adam Sandler make more movies after Little Nicky, because white men are allowed to fail spectacularly and keep their jobs.

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.

Billy McFarland is the most obvious bumbling con-artist dumbass ever birthed by the universe. He’s the guy who never helps on the group project. He’s the bully’s least memorable henchman. He’s that kind of American rich kid who doesn’t bother to learn more than one vowel. He looks like the producers spread peanut butter on his tongue and then had his audio dubbed by a frat guy halfway through dying of alcohol poisoning. 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.

A person’s standard of likability is a reflection of his beliefs, and unfortunately, in this country, a whole lot of people believe that Donald Trump is not a racist shart in an eight-foot tie who is unqualified for literally every job except “lie down.”

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.

If one was feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out,

If we're being honest, this might be one of the single funniest lines ever written

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.

Our stories are ours just as our country is ours just as our bodies are ours.

None of it was ever about communication, a good-faith exchange of ideas. It was about making women mad so you can call them crazy and justify hurting them to make yourself feel better about your broken little life and cling to your pitiful scraps of institutional power because you have no power as a person.

“I hope this crazy country gets itself figured out before things get worse.” “Me, too,” I said. “I would really like to keep living.” “Yeah?” Randy pounced. “How would you like to live… forever?” Unfortunately, his offer had the opposite of its intended effect, as I immediately and permanently died.

Of course the kids of Trump supporters think that Priuses—which, by the way, are still mass transit–killing, fossil fuel–burning luxury items manufactured by the automotive industry, so, yes, extremely granola—are effeminate and embarrassing, virtue signaling for cucks, because waste is manly and destruction is manly and real manly men drive trucks guns bang bang toot toot truck deer beer mud truck vroom black smoke logging antlers tits fire and blood.

If you train people to scoff at community and stewardship—at tending to the needs of others, yes, but also at advocating for oneself—you can do whatever you want to them and they will not complain. You can strip away their ability to earn a living wage, to send their kids to college, to retire. You can undermine their most sacred values. You can allow children to be massacred, and they’ll weep for the guns.

This is toxic masculinity at its most pitiful. How sad—and I don’t mean that with disgust, it is truly, profoundly sad—to let us all die because you’ve been taught that wanting not to die is cowardice; that vulnerability is weakness; that anything short of charging into the increasingly brief future, assault rifle blazing, exhaust belching, with half-chewed feedlot steak falling out of your mouth, constitutes some sort of romantic tongue kiss with a perfect male figure skater, and that a romantic tongue kiss with a perfect male figure skater would be something worth genociding the planet to avoid.

But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness; it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.

Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered—not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer language, because it makes people’s lives worse. In tangible ways. For generations.