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.

So, just to clarify, you guys get to be the witch-hunters and the witches and the witch-hunter-hunters who hunt down any witches who are witch-hunting too hard. And the rest of us get burned.

He’s every deadbeat hookup, every narcissistic loser, every man who’s ever tried to leverage power, money, fame, credibility, or physical strength to snap your boundaries like matchsticks. He is hot fear and cold dread and a pit in your stomach. He’s the man who held you back, who never took you seriously, who treated you like nothing until you started to believe it, who raped you and told you it was your fault and whose daddy was a cop, so who would believe you anyway?

Systemic inequality makes choice an illusion.

It’s about who feels safe in public spaces and who doesn’t. Which is to say, it’s about everything.

Accountability hurts, but what’s the alternative? The way things were? Harvey Weinstein loosening his bathrobe while your daughter cowers in front of him?

So fine, if you insist. This is a witch hunt. We’re witches, and we’re hunting you.

The problem isn’t that people have latent biases that manifest in unexpected ways; it’s that we, as a society, are fundamentally allergic to examining those biases and holding ourselves accountable.

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.

We are addicted to not being inconvenienced by reality, even in the most mundane circumstances.

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.

white men are allowed to fail spectacularly and keep their jobs.

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.

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

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 be hot and a husband’s job to be funny. From The Smurfs I learned that boys can have seventy-eight possible personalities and girls can have one, which is “high heels.” From The Breakfast 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 complicated women are “crazy” and complicated men are geniuses.

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.

Well, good! I’m glad this is uncomfortable for you! The partisan divide is not insignificant or cute.

I think about it when abortion rights are framed as men’s to take away but only women’s to fight for.

How about men take on the economic and social burdens of calling out toxic patterns of gendered socialization?

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.

We did not install that glass ceiling, and it is not our responsib...

The whole society is not for single girls, you know that. Single men, yes. A man, he’s single, he’s so lucky. A boy on a date, all he has to be is clean and able to pick up the check, he’s a winner, you know that.… A girl has to be well dressed, face has to look nice, the hair has to be in shape. The girl has to be the one that’s bright and pretty, intelligent, a good sport.… A girl, you’re thirty years old, you’re not married, you’re an old maid. A man, he’s ninety years old, he’s not married, he’s a catch.… A man in this society, as long as he’s alive he’s a catch.

we can no longer rely on our political system to protect our rights, all we can do is double down on culture change. We write our stories down, we meet, we talk, we make art, we travel to the places where access is most in jeopardy and we listen, we reach out to our relatives, we hold the line, we chip away.

The tech companies allowing white supremacy and violent misogyny to flourish on their platforms could do something about it. Never forget that they choose not to.

It was a movement designed to make women angry, so that men could take that anger and hold it up and say, “See? See? They are hysterical. They are violent. They do hate men.”

He won. She was nice, and she lost.

Like every other feminist with a public platform, I am perpetually cast as a disapproving scold. But what’s the alternative? To approve? I do not approve.