Mediaboss Marketing

All women are witches would be a truly provocative premise. But what is a witch in 2017? The author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, dishes up different definitions, framing a witch-as-everywoman thesis to suit the modern day feminista. The witch is less a sorceress driven by the Devil or a terrible crone from a Russian folktale, more a politically engaged Pagan with a tumblr account. Author Kristen Sollee of Slutist.com earlier reclaimed slut for the womens movement but she didnt stop there! Sollee settles on a vague and inoffensive meaning of witch, n.: embodiment of a powerful femininity rooted in the earth, which transcends patriarchal influence. And her storyahem, herstorystarts with the sacred whores of Mesopotamian temples and culminates with Hillary Clintons presidential campaign.

An unbroken chain of nasty women joins the modern slut, who shalt not be shamed, to the witch, whos been maligned for millennia. (The witchs broom? Not just a broom, Sollee winks.) Her titular sex-positivity is about as subtle as the Slut Walks her website sponsors, vaguely political displays in which scantily clad hipsters take to the streets, daring the people of Santa Cruz to objectify them. And then a tenuous transition from the chapter Hillary Clinton: Wicked Witch of the Left to a celebration of the slut as the witch of the twenty-first century sets the archetype at war with itself.

Clinton, while no friend to the loose woman, came to own her witchery through frequent comparisons to Hermione Granger, the studious tryhard of young adult fiction fame. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, whom Clinton beat by one type of black magic, hosted a link on his official website to a donors Bern the Witch fundraiser until a Clinton supporter complained and the Sanders campaign removed it. Shes a witch with a capital B, to Rush Limbaugh. Compared to the ubiquitous b word, Witch adds an element of supernatural evil that has no male equivalent in common use, writes Sollee.

This is the archetypal witch that sowed deadly paranoia in Salem circa 1692 and helped propel Stevie Nicks dark desirability. The essence of witchinessnow relieved of dark age superstition and the incumbent death sentence when a witch was discoveredstill evokes a secret, something shrouded in taboo and therefore unspeakably cool. Stevie Nicks wrote Rhiannon about an old Welsh witch, dresses in billowy capes and black velvet, and called her first solo album Bella Donna (otherwise known as sorcerers berry,) the plant belladonna brews a sinister sleeping potion). She denies rumors that shes a practicing pagan, and she wasnt oppressed by the patriarchy in any well-known way (although Sollee suggests otherwise without explanation, thickly worrying that she and other 1960s and 70s rockers allied themselves with witchcraft in a time when doing so was dangerous, and could even threaten their creative careers); Nicks was and is a performer who gives the people what they want, without giving too much away.

Sollee gets closest to the central contradiction in a meditation on the witch-slut dichotomy as a matter of concealment by degrees. She quotes fashion historian Valerie Steele on the attraction of concealment, as Sigmund Freud and Casanova knew it, and the neo-Victorian aesthetic [of] having the body all covered, draped in a mercurial black. Both sluts and witches thrive in high fashion. What distinguishes a slut from a witch? While more fabric often means more witchy, leaving less to the imagination is the sluts job. The slut lays bares what the witch keeps hidden. Denuding the witch demystifies her, and stripping away the mystique that made witchery alluring in the first place debases her to slut statuswhich, for the slutwalking sisterhood, is one kind of victory. Bur undressing witchy women, what Sollee aims to do, wont dent an historical sexism already in steep decline.

A commitment to intersectionality is non-negotiable, Sollee clarifies early on. But in one not so intersectional instance, Sollee invites us to look for the heiresses to Salems survivors among our sisters, How many of us are the granddaughters of the witches they could not burn? No skin off my nose, but surely only the WASPiest witches can trace their matrilineage to Cotton Mathers Massachusetts. Insistence on a trans-inclusive intersectional redefinition of witch in the age of social justice contortionism further confuses the witch-as-everywoman ideal: This book specifically looks at the indivisible links between the witch, femininity, and womanhoodwhich includes trans women and anyone on the feminine spectrumand the persecution women have faced as a result of their perceived connection with witchcraft.

There are now more women out there than ever casting spells and doing spooky things with pentagrams, apparently. Technology is just another tool at my magickal disposal. If I can conjure spirits with an old root and a circle of salt, why not through a website? witch Melissa Madara told Sollee in a survey. Internet witches hexed President Trump earlier this year in a spellcasting campaign to bind his harmful agenda and drive him from office. Amid the mercurial topography of the arduous journey toward gender equality, stands the witch, a beacon in blackand a loutish president has revived the call, Sollee writes. Trump tweets, meanwhile, about investigations into his administration's ties to the Putin regime as a witch hunt. Appropriating witchery is another problem, the unpacking of which leads our author to the broader commercial appropriation of a mercantile feminism marked by mass-produced This Is What a Feminist Looks Like t-shirtsand the ethical imperative that witch-identifying women use their magic toward anti-capitalist ends. (Although if I were a witch, I think Id use my powers to turn a profit.)

Its also clear that the archetypal witchs dark mystery shares an etiology with what Betty Friedan in 1963s Feminine Mystique called the problem that has no name. Whenever women collude, however inconsequentially, we get to enjoy a semblance of covenish conspiracy. And wherever women are excluded from public life, their sisterly camaraderie gleans an aura of mystery from menssometimes fatalsuspicions. (Women are still persecuted for sorcery in nations where superstition trumps gender equality.) Imagining devilry at the root of whatever escapes his understanding, man conjured the witch.

Excepting the occultists, the Wiccans, the truly weird, witchiness for most women can be a fashion choice or an otherworldly quality observed in an otherwise normal acquaintancemy grade school art teacher, for example. (Witches were also called intuitives," Sollee notes the euphemism multiple times.) Women dont go around worrying if their witchiness is showing, but if the witch in all of us remains, its still something of a secret. A wisp of wildness, the thread of a confusing Virginia Woolf passage slipping ecstatically away from sense and order, a womans wandering mind straining to catch up with itself. Progressive gender discourse prefers to deny indivisible gender, but according to Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, womens untraceable transcendent powercall it what you willhas persisted through millennia of persecution. Heres betting itll outlast the Trump administration, and the gender fluidity fad too.

Follow this link:
Liberals Love Witches - The Weekly Standard