The Witches are Coming

by Lindy West

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. Not everyone has the luxury of detaching from politics for an afternoon to eat a hot dog.

I think about it when abortion rights are framed as men’s to take away but only women’s to fight for. Naturally, I thought about it constantly as #MeToo ripped through entertainment and politics and our own families, illuminating the ubiquity and scale of male sexual entitlement.

The truth of abortion is that people need abortions and always will. You cannot legislate abortion out of existence—you can control only who has safe abortions and who has dangerous ones, who is considered a full person in the eyes of her government and who is a state-owned incubator, who is free and who is not.

This artificial divide between past and present is a tactic I recognize now among certain sects of antifeminism and the alt-right, the ones still shy of overt Nazism, still striving for plausible deniability. Second-wave feminists were legitimate feminists, men used to tweet at me between flurries of harassment, believing that the concession worked as a kind of camouflage. Of course women should have the vote, checking accounts, birth control, jobs. It’s the third- and fourth-wave feminists they have a problem with—the “identitarians,” the “professional victims”—who demand equality not just in politics (as though we have that) but in culture. 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. The ones who want to have recreational sex but don’t want to be raped. The ones who are all about “safe, legal” abortion but reject the compulsory “rare.” The