“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 women’s movement but she didn’t 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 story—ahem, herstory—starts with the sacred whores of Mesopotamian temples and culminates with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
An unbroken chain of nasty women joins the modern “slut,” who shalt not be shamed, to the “witch,” who’s been maligned for millennia. (The witch’s 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 donor’s “Bern the Witch” fundraiser until a Clinton supporter complained and the Sanders campaign removed it. She’s 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 witchiness—now relieved of dark age superstition and the incumbent death sentence when a “witch” was discovered—still 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 “sorcerer’s berry,” the plant belladonna brews a sinister sleeping potion). She denies rumors that she’s a practicing pagan, and she wasn’t 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 slut’s job.” The “slut” lays bare 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” status—which, for the slutwalking sisterhood, is one kind of victory. Bur “undressing” witchy women, what Sollee aims to do, won’t 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 Salem’s 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 Mather’s 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 womanhood—which includes trans women and anyone on the feminine spectrum—and 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 black”—and 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-shirts—and the ethical imperative that “witch-identifying women” use their magic toward anti-capitalist ends. (Although if I were a witch, I think I’d use my powers to turn a profit.)
It’s also clear that the archetypal witch’s dark mystery shares an etiology with what Betty Friedan in 1963’s 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 men’s—sometimes fatal—suspicions. (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 acquaintance—my grade school art teacher, for example. (Witches were also called “intuitives.” Sollee notes the euphemism multiple times.) Women don’t go around worrying if their witchiness is showing, but if the “witch in all of us” remains, it’s 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 woman’s 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, women’s untraceable transcendent power—call it what you will—has persisted through millennia of persecution. Here’s betting it’ll outlast the Trump administration, and the gender fluidity fad too.
