The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

“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.

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.

The movement can’t just disrupt the culture; it has to become the culture. Anything else is just a red herring.

like Dungeons and Dragons for your vaginal flora.

Irreverence is the ultimate luxury item.

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.

“Do you ever stick up for me?”

Brag to me about your pockets when they’re FILLED WITH UNION PAMPHLETS AND FREE TAMPONS FOR THE HOMELESS.

Plenty of people still believe that on some level—if you are a good woman—abortion is a choice which should [be] accompanied by some level of sadness, shame, or regret. But you know what? I have a good heart and having an abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way. Why wouldn’t I be happy that I was not forced to become a mother?

The chasm between who people claim to be and how they actually behave is vast. We have to fill that chasm up with truth so we can climb out of it.

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

It’s a strategy I recognize: telling people the lies they’re hungry for, constructing an alternate reality, refusing to back down in the face of facts, spamming the discursive field until people just accept that it must have some legitimacy in the “debate”—Trumpism is the internet troll playbook.

We were too soft. We, who literally inured ourselves to rape threats and death threats so that we could participate in public life, were called weak by people who felt persecuted by the existence of female Ghostbusters. Meanwhile, Twitter’s leadership offered us the ability to embed GIFs.

You know what actually got them to leave me alone? Quitting Twitter. Refusing to play. Essentially, deplatforming them from my life. It works.

I did not call myself a feminist until I was nearly twenty years old. My world had taught me that feminists were ugly, angry, and ridiculous, and I did not want to be ugly, angry, and ridiculous. I wanted to be cool and desired by men, because even as a teenager I knew implicitly that pandering for male approval was what women were supposed to do. It was my best shot at success, or at least safety, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to see that success and safety, bestowed conditionally, aren’t success and safety at all; they are domestication and implied violence. To put it another way, it took me two decades to become brave enough to be angry.

As though white men’s monopolistic death grip on power in the United States doesn’t belie precisely the kind of “identity politics” they claim to abhor.

When a woman gets angry, the typical response is: She didn’t understand what happened. She misunderstood.

Feminism is the collective manifestation of female anger. Men suppress our anger for a reason. Let’s prove them right.

But only because this is a very wild thing to happen to a person and an exceedingly unlikely thing to happen at all (especially to me, an only quasisentient body pillow who DVRs Guy’s Grocery Games and whose favorite Dorito flavor is Spicy Sweet Chili—what!?), so it would almost be disrespectful not to brag about it, if you think about it.

Yeah, I’m a witch and I’m hunting you, and so on, but catching you doesn’t liberate fat people any more than trapping one fox makes chickens immortal. This kind of witchcraft, unfortunately, isn’t magic.

You can take care of something without personally caring about it, which is precisely what our elected officials are supposed to do: take care of our communities and our planet, whether or not they personally share our priorities and fears and weaknesses and religions and sexual orientations and gender identities and skin colors.

The ones for whom it isn’t enough for rape to be illegal but who want society to examine the behaviors that foster and enable sexual predation in the first place.

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.

The Straw Feminist character is part of a fictional post-feminist world that only exists in Hollywood, the trope is a tool that’s used to promote the fallacy that everyone is already equal.

Those kids were born after 9/11 into a fractured place. They didn’t get any quiet years, I guess, when, in many communities (not all, of course) the end of the world felt abstract and far away. Young people are here and strong and smart and fierce, and they do not intend to die. They are artists and scientists and leaders, and we just have to show up and fight for them, and with them, every day until we die. It is not their job to save us—we are the parents—but may they inspire us to help them save themselves. I feel afraid in this moment, but I do not feel hopeless.

We know that lax gun laws turn male rage into massacres.