It jumped out of 2017 and scurried into the darkest corners. It latched on to satire’s face, only to burst from satire’s chest with the most ludicrous headlines. Overall, it was a bad, weird year, but men —  especially — did not come off looking good in 2018, and it’s time to examine what lessons we should glean from these past 12 months to make our collective futures less bad and weird…maybe even better.

#1 Words vs. Conduct: Louis C.K.

In response to displaying his penis at non-consenting women, comedian Louis C.K. took time off to allegedly reconsider himself. “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” he said in November 2017. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”  

That lasted all of five minutes.

Mr. C.K. was back on stage just a few months later, and was recently recorded dressing up his white guy whines as comedy, including his chagrin when people with Down syndrome asked the word ‘r***rded’ not be used anymore (he felt his freedom was invaded); he mocked black and Asian men, berated trans people, and belittled the students of the Parkland shooting who survived a horrific massacre.

The question is not whether he’s allowed to say these things – as far as I know, he’s not been charged – but whether he should.

Despite admitting to the sexual misconduct, C.K.’s response showed no development. Indeed, all his response did was cast off the veneer of the self-reflecting white guy that made him important to many of us: His insights into white privilege and being a (cishet) white man, for example, were poignant, challenging other white people.

His admitting of sexual misconduct should have been the catalyst for Mr. C.K. to use those assets he had cultivated to grow and to teach, as we know he’s capable of doing. Instead, Mr. C.K. simply became another angry, entitled white man, who viewed criticism as intolerance, progress as immorality and bigotry as entertainment.

The Lesson

People reveal their true selves at their lowest point, not at the height of comfort; it’s easy to be the good guy when you have nothing to lose, easy to use the right words to convey a belief. It’s much harder to demonstrate those beliefs via conduct. Men can easily learn to say the right words and support the right values without having to put any actual effort into themselves. This is why we have many cases of so-called good guys revealing the cracks made by patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

No one is claiming to be a good person you need to be perfect. Perfection is unattainable. Instead, part of what makes a good person is owning up to failure and mistakes, improving yourself and encouraging others like you to do the same, working toward never committing those same failings again. Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.

Having cultivated the image of a woke white man, with an audience receptive to his moral challenges, Mr. C.K. shrugged it all off and swam with the status quo; it was flowing in his preferred direction.

Being good is a verb, not a state anyone reaches.
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Mr. C.K. is an interesting example because he shows what men should avoid but also—in his past—how men can be better: He used his privilege to speak out and challenge those like him. We need more men holding mirrors and fewer holding hammers.

#2 Listening to Women: Aziz Ansari

Aziz Ansari was accused by a woman of being incredibly inappropriate toward her, making her feel unsafe, and repeatedly ignoring her rejections of his come-ons. Ansari and the woman went on a date, back to his place, then he became increasingly aggressive: he kissed, fondled and so on, almost as soon as she was inside. As babe.net put it: “Throughout the course of her short time in the apartment, she says she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was.” After eventually leaving, she was in distress. When she messaged him some time later, he conveyed surprise and an apology.

In response to the whole story, many men pointed to the Weinsteins and Spaceys of the world as “actually” deserving condemnation, for their aggressive, criminal assaults – Ansari’s conduct was handwaved away as confusion, miscommunication, or somewhat fictional. He thought it was consensual and even apologized!

For many, Ansari’s bonafides as an outspoken feminist male comedian created a large fortress from such accusations: How could someone like that, who writes and thinks and discusses the nuances of dating, who proudly and vocally supports feminism, be at fault in this? Maybe this young woman has just reacted poorly!

What’s more important than the story however are the responses.

The Lesson

It’s easy for men to speak out against the criminal acts of Weinstein and Spacey. It’s far harder to reflect on Ansari’s situation. Yet, it’s precisely that the incident isn’t an obviously criminal one that makes it more troublesome. The reality is: More men have been an Ansari than a Weinstein.  

The chances are, if you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.

You can prevent a lot of that by reading and listening to women. Take a mild example, as noted by the brilliant Madeleine Holden: men who never ask their dates questions. As Holden notes, the men say the dates went amazingly, while the women note how these same men didn’t ask a single question about their dates. It wasn’t so much a date as an unprofessional, free therapy session. If men are not even reading the room when it comes to basic conversations in public, is it any wonder, in their—arguably—aggressively horny states, that men will not read or consider women’s comfort levels in private? Men can and must be better than this.

If you’re a cis man that’s dated or dates women, chances are you’ve done something to make a woman uncomfortable in your attempt to be sexy.
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Patriarchy has taught men to equate our experience with truth, relegating other experiences to the language of sensitivity or ridiculousness. Instead of viewing women’s experiences as additional windows on the same experience, we dismiss those experiences as mere finger paintings.

Listen to women, not just in the immediate sense, but as an active part of your life — seek out their perspectives, pay attention, and read the goddamn room. (Also, you’re an adult in control of your conduct — you can’t use horniness as an excuse.)

#3 Opposing Nazis Works: Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer

If you’re worried only bad men had a good year, take some comfort: Both Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer had a terrible year.

Yiannopoulos, it was recently revealed, is almost $2 million in debt, and has lost a great deal of the fame he’d cultivated from the poisoned Nazi garden he had managed. He was banned from Patreon, Venmo, and PayPal. He also dropped his lawsuit against former publisher Simon & Schuster, after they refused to publish his (terrible) book.  

Spencer didn’t fare better. He cancelled his speaking tour due to low audience attendance but high numbers of anti-fascist protestors. Spencer’s wife filed for divorce, alleging he is a domestic abuser. He has had to rethink his strategy for spreading white supremacy and pro-fascism to young men – he’s been trying desperately not to say he’s losing to passionate anti-fascist protestors.

The Lesson

Actively not listening to fascists and Nazis works! As Rachel Kraus notes:

“The fact that Yiannopoulos has found his reach and influence so depleted that he can’t get new gigs and takes to comments on Facebook to complain shows the real world effect that de-platforming a toxic public figure can actually have.”

Spencer has stopped trying to lecture at universities because it’s far too troublesome, and his audience’s passion doesn’t match the numbers or organizational skills of his opponents.

We do not need to give equal time under the guise of fairness. Not all political issues are conceptual discussions about the best economic theory; some involve the lived experiences and social aspects of particular groups.

Nazis and pro-fascists aren’t giving alternative opinions about race or gender, they’re spreading hatred. They dress their supremacy under the guise of civil rights, complaining that their power is being taken from them, while at the same time saying those taking away power are beneath them. They never quite square this Swastika but it’s not about logic: hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.  

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to bring logic to a Klan meetup. Listen to those affected by hate groups, work toward actively opposing those wanting to spread Nazism and fascism and don’t give them even an inch. Men, in particular, are the leaders of these movements and it should be other men—especially white men—who speak out loudly, passionately and with full voice to their emotions.

Hatred can’t be debunked, it can only be opposed.
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The Nazi’s call for debate is a cheatcode to get you to debate people’s humanity, dragging you down into the racist trenches. Stay out, stay firm, yell, oppose, bring your placards, report abuse. We need more men showing emotion for good causes rather than ridiculous/racist/sexist ones.

Explainers everywhere are working overtime to preserve patriarchal values. One popular strategy that continues to crop up states that, “rape is different from other crimes because it’s a ‘he said/she said’ situation.” This faulty line of reasoning reveals three things: an assumption that in disputes between men and women, men must be given the benefit of the doubt; an assumption that all rapists are men and all victims women; and glaring ignorance about how the U.S. justice system actually operates.

The justice system runs on testimonial evidence, which is exactly what “he said/she said” is. What makes a “he said/she said situation” different from any other dispute between witnesses? In a word: Nothing.

Whether it’s a small claims case between neighbors over dog poop, or a death penalty case of murder in the first degree, witnesses will give testimony, and each side’s testimony will usually oppose the other side’s testimony. If everyone agreed, there would be no reason to be in court to begin with.

Inevitably, some of these disputed cases will pit “he said” testimony against “she said” testimony. We hear the “he said/she said situation” line exclusively in sexual assault cases because men have been accustomed through history to the benefit of the doubt (if not outright commendation) in heterosexual rape cases.

Cases are decided every day based solely on witness testimony. The “lack of corroborating evidence” for testimony — cited by Senator Susan Collins and others during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings as a potential violation of Kavanaugh’s rights — doesn’t mean a denial of due process, the fair procedures that the  all citizens are entitled to, nor does it void a presumption of innocence.

To be clear, testimony by a competent witness is sufficient evidence on its own.

The legal definition of “competent” has evolved over the last one hundred fifty years to mean, simply, being able to perceive and communicate what happened. The “he said/she said” line is likely a holdover from when certain groups of people were classified as incompetent witnesses by virtue of their status. In ancient Athens, for example, women were excluded from courts entirely. And in the 21st century, Jewish law in Orthodox and Conservative communities still holds that women are not competent witnesses in most cases.

To be clear, testimony by a competent witness is sufficient evidence on its own.
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Excluding people of color from testifying was a common practice in the States, and it was legal until passage in 1868 of the 14th Amendment. Why? As one court held, it was because of “their crude and monstrous superstitions, which rendered them incapable of feeling or appreciating the obligation of an oath, as felt and appreciated in a Christian community; and it was not, therefore, deemed safe to receive them as witnesses, even against one another.”

Under similar rationale, atheists of any color were also deemed incompetent to testify, beginning  in the States during colonial times and extending in many jurisdictions through the mid-nineteenth century. Denying people the right to testify, or questioning the credibility of a particular demographic, has always been a way for courts to strengthen social hierarchies like institutional racism and sexism.

The 'he said/she said' line is likely a holdover from when certain groups of people were classified as incompetent witnesses by virtue of their status.
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While women and people of color are now, legally, competent to testify, barriers against them persist. Leigh Gilmore, author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives and a distinguished visiting professor at Wellesley College, writes that sexual and racial violence are seen by some as “belonging to a separate ordered of judgment.” Moreover, gender and race stereotypes are “sticky judgments,” so ubiquitous that we can’t see them, so prevalent that they seem “neutral.”

When asked to share some thoughts about how doubting women’s testimony creates a benefit for men in the justice system, she says,  

“[G]ender bias makes doubting women feel rational and virtuous rather than unjust. ‘He said’ carries more weight than what ‘she said’ because women’s testimony is demeaned and discredited in ways that men’s testimony isn’t. . . .We have vividly seen with the #MeToo movement the effects of this bias: the lack of transparent and fair processes for women to report sexual violence, the blaming of victims for bringing forward accusations of sexual assault both “too soon” and risking men’s reputations and also “too late,” which disregards all the mechanisms for silencing and shaming victims.”

In this view, witnesses from the dominant group get the benefit of the doubt. Even though it’s a legal truism that “most facts are proved by testimony,” and that even in cases where physical evidence exists, “the human recital — viva voce — is often crucial to the establishment of its authenticity or significance,” testimony from members of marginalized groups in the States and elsewhere has often been cast as unreliable, or simply excluded from consideration.

As a former trial attorney, I’ve seen how the he said/she said dynamic is replicated in cases involving parties from opposite ends of a hierarchy. It could be “white cop says/black kid says,” or “boss says/employee says,” or “priest says/choirboy says,” or “corporate polluter says/environmental group says.” In any case, the member of the dominant class gets the benefit of the doubt. Dr. Gilmore connects this bullshit phenomenon to the “reasonable man” standard in U.S. law:

Take the legal fiction of the ‘reasonable man’ whose motives and actions juries are instructed to consider as the standard for deciding, for example, cases of self-defense. When women claim self-defense in cases where they kill a man, often a violent intimate partner whom they know is intent upon inflicting violence on them — an act that meets the self-defense standard — juries often fail to apply self-defense accurately because they doubt women were justified in using force to defend themselves for two reasons: the assumption that the woman overreacted or that the man’s life, to be blunt, is worth more. We see this in rape cases in lenient sentencing for men like Brock Turner whose father was outraged that his son would be punished for raping an unconscious woman, an act he described as ‘a steep price to pay for twenty minutes of action.’

Just imagine reactions to someone claiming that a prison term was a “steep price to pay” for a woman who took only twenty minutes to torture a man. Flipping the script on cultural assumptions is one way of highlighting their injustice. Dr. Gilmore expects a backlash.

Gender and race stereotypes are 'sticky judgments,' so ubiquitous that we can’t see them, so prevalent that they seem 'neutral.'
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Bias is woven into all the processes for judging what women and people of color say about their lives; so is the unfair privilege that powerful men receive in all aspects of life. In the leveling of this imbalance, men will likely feel aggrieved by the loss of this unearned and undeserved testimonial credit, as will all of those habituated to thinking that male elites deserve this credit.

Victims of racist and sexual assaults will continue to risk further abuse in police stations, courtrooms, congressional hearings, and the media until we explode all versions of “he said/she said” dynamics. And that means a constant, close examination of how media and justice systems treat women and people of color when they come forward to testify.

The New York Times recently reported that “over the past four years, at least 10 people in South Texas have been victims of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping or rape” at the hands of United States Border Patrol agents. The agents — including one man who went on a 12-day killing spree targeting sex workers — are described to have “suddenly and violently snapped.”

This stands in stark contrast to President Trump’s repeated racist attempts to paint immigrants from Mexico as “killers and rapists.” Indeed the subtext of the Times‘ writing is that it’s not those who cross the border who should be feared, but those tasked with enforcing inhumane immigration policies against them.

The Times also suggests the possibility that “the very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work—dealing with vulnerable, powerless people, often alone on the nation’s little-traveled frontiers,” contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place. After all, many of these attacks occurred prior to Trump’s reign of terror — including under President Obama — which suggests that the way the United States approaches border control has long been deeply racist and dehumanizing.

We also know that law enforcement officers across the United States are trained to treat people inhumanely, especially Black and brown people, and this reality has also led to a well-documented epidemic of mass incarceration and violence, including sexual violence. In fact, the New York Times also reported this month that women working in the Federal Bureau of Prisons face a near constant threat of assault and harassment, often from their own co-workers.

This portrait of Border Agents could also be applied to the ever-expansive pool of mass shooters, who are also often described as having mysteriously “snapped,” although it’s well-documented that they are largely straight men — typically white — and almost always have a history of violence against women. Not so mysterious.

Every day, men throughout society are encouraged to dominate “vulnerable, powerless people,” including those traversing well-traveled areas, and they know that they are very likely to get away with their aggression — or even be rewarded for it. This is not coincidence. It’s due in part to patriarchy, a social system that not only values men over women, but the behaviors which we describe as “masculine” over those which we call “feminine.” It is — as race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw emphasizes — inherently linked to white supremacy, capitalism, and other social systems rooted in ideals of dominance.

The very nature of Border Patrol agents’ work contributes to their ability to get away with their crimes, as well their inclination to commit them in the first place.
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And yet, none of the news reports above mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression. Despite the array of blockbuster reports over the past two years unveiling sexual violence in various American institutions, we — especially men in power —  still seem far more comfortable discussing how the specific “nature” of certain environments lend themselves to rape than we are acknowledging that the very structuring of our society is the reason that these types of environments exist in the first place.

In Vivek Shraya’s new memoir, I’m Afraid of Men, the writer and artist never shies away from that bigger picture, beginning with a painstaking account of a day in her life as a trans South Asian woman living in Canada. We follow her as she faces a near constant barrage of sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and literal threats of violence as she walks out of her apartment, logs onto the Internet, does her job, and simply survives the day. Shreya underlines the ways in which the fear of men has been reinforced and affirmed throughout her life, from childhood onward.

In the Times article “Hazing, Humiliation, Terror: Working While Female in Federal Prison,” a prison employee named Jessica recounts something similar in relation to her working conditions:

Every single day something happened, whether it was an inmate jerking off to you, whether it was an inmate pushing you, whether it was a staff member harassing you through email, on a phone, following you to your car.

Both of these accounts echo the report on Border Patrol as well, in which one of the survivors, M.G., describes the moment when she, her daughter, and another woman from the same town in Honduras were first detained by the agent who would go on to attack them all:

“When I saw him, I said, ‘Thank God,’” M.G. said.

But they slowly began to worry as they sat on metal benches in the back of the truck. M.G. thought there was something strange about the way the man was breathing. At first, she tried not to show her fear to the girls.

“I pretended,” she said. “I tried to be strong.”

The acceptance of hypermasculine brooding, anger, and intimidation in our society means people become accustomed to, adept at, suppressing their legitimate fears in order to appease those in power. Not just in prison or while risking their lives to cross into a new country, but as Shraya writes, the fear of men “governs” the choices she must make “from the beginning of my day to the end,” from the way an email is written to deciding what to wear out the door. (Particularly as a trans woman of color).

None of the news reports mentioned include the word patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, or any other reference to historically entrenched gendered oppression.
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Ultimately, M.G. dragged herself out of the brush where she was left for dead and was able to alert another Border Patrol agent passing through. It seems to take such death-defying acts of heroism, or painfully-researched exposes in mainstream media, to even get us to face this violence. Yet, even then, there’s an avoidance of the deeper pattern.

The naming of patriarchy is largely discouraged by those in power because of patriarchy. As bell hooks has written:

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word ‘patriarchy’ in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained.

To name patriarchy is to name the existence of historic gendered oppression, which is to name the existence of systemic bias against what we call femininity. And that is, in turn, an attack on the legitimacy of masculinity, the gender and sex binary, and how we are fundamentally taught to conceptualize power. In other words, naming patriarchy risks dismantling it.

In an essay for The Atlantic last year, Vann R. Newkirk II addressed the backlash against the increased use of “white supremacy” in the Trump era, responding to critics who argue that its usage has become overly broad. Newkirk clarified that this systemic “definition of white supremacy has long animated black activism,” including the work of Martin Luther King Jr., and efforts to reduce its scope have always been directly linked to the ever-expansive project of sweeping racism under the rug:   

The repackaging of Jim Crow into a “race neutral” set of policies didn’t just arise as a wink-and-a-nod deal in southern political backrooms a few years near the end of the civil-rights movement, but was a half-century-long project forged by thousands of lawyers and mainstream political leaders that costs millions of dollars, and was played out in every arena across the country from the Supreme Court to town hall meetings.

When we do tend to hear patriarchy these days it’s often in the form of the limiting phrase “the patriarchy” and it is similarly marginalized to “backrooms” where a certain group of powerful men apparently decide the fates of women. Indeed, some of the rebuttals to the existence of “the patriarchy” come down to the argument: but women are in those rooms too!

This diminishment and dismissal of the dominator culture in which we are swimming, happens in tandem with the avoidance of white supremacy and the fact that this society was in fact built upon white patriarchal violence. Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword—and the subsequent backlash to its use—we don’t often describe in detail the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.

Keeping these systems in obscurity serves a status quo in which indigenous women living in poverty, while carrying the generational trauma of genocide—on land targeted for environmental destruction—are still the most likely to be raped and assaulted (and usually by white men).

Extreme situations, like the dehumanization happening at our southern border or within our prison system, must be challenged, but isolating hypermasculine violence to particular conditions, independent of history, has also long been a tactic for avoiding cultural change. Or for dismissing unsavory problems as situational.

We’ve seen that in the way many have attempted to reduce Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement to a white Hollywood issue. Or in the way people like Trump blame terrorism on Muslims, or dismiss the epidemic of rape in the military by suggesting that it’s unavoidable in those conditions, asking incredulously, “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?.”  

The irony is that these attempts at narrowing the conversation always end up doing the opposite: If the situation is to blame, why are there so many different situations producing similar results? Why is it a given that men will attack women when in isolation? Why do we simply accept the terror of masculinity as a fact of life?

Connecting this all to patriarchy means a commitment to describing how aggression, violence, and dominance are normalized all around us. It requires our constant effort to link the idealization of masculinity to that of things like whiteness, thinness, ability, wealth, Christianity, cisnormativity, and the destruction of our environment. It demands a more complicated story.

Despite the popularity of “intersectionality” as a buzzword, we don’t often describe the various systems of dominance, including capitalism and imperialism, which overlap to compound oppression.
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At the end of I’m Afraid of Men, Shraya laments that “any ambiguity or nonconformity, especially in relation to gender, conjures terror. This is precisely why men are afraid of me. Why women are afraid of me too.”

What she yearns for is a world free of gendered expectations altogether, one in which we follow trans and gender-nonconforming people of color toward our “sublime” possibilities. Words alone do not ensure that safer, physical reality — a society without borders or prisons or hierarchies — but naming systems does force certain realities into the light. And perhaps dares us to look for a path.

In Pakistan, and in my native language Urdu, woman translates into Aurat, which comes from the Persian Awrah, meaning “parts to be protected.” Literally, too, in my present Muslim, closed-knit, patriarchal society, women like me are guided—by their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons—to be protected from threats against their body and family honor.

While these men encourage “Western” trends to an extent—like education at reputable schools, recreational sports, or even temporary employment—cultural traditions halt these prospects after marriage. You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.

Because culture is reinforced by practice, and because most girls in my family and neighborhood were married off at nineteen or twenty, naturally I grew up understanding that my life would turn out to be largely the same.

And like most families around us, my family was also wary of sending their daughters abroad for higher studies. Local education until we reached marriageable age seemed sufficient. My sister and I were taught that there were enough boys in the house to look after the family distribution business; thus, for us, a long-term career wasn’t a priority. I would, instead, have to marry well, and learn how to manage my in-laws’ household.

My father, Baba, maintained from my birth that our culture was different from the “West’s.” He was adamant that we both expand our horizons and maintain our own set of traditional values. While our family travelled every summer, to Europe or the U.K., my parents were their own Pakistani selves there. At eight, I shuffled awkwardly behind Mama, who wore a traditional, full-length shalwar kameez, while Baba—his trousers religiously hitched above his ankles—stood in line to buy tickets at Disneyland Paris.

Baba never reacted to the half-naked foreigners around us. He took it as a means to educate his daughters. “People dress and live differently here,” he’d explain. “They value independence over family. We don’t. See everything, Mehreen. Gain exposure. But always stay true to your culture.”

I was fully clad under his protection, yet embarrassed. A part of me was enchanted by the liberation around me, by how the women we met—at somber restaurants, glittering hotel receptions, crowded tours—could have the authority to choose what to wear, where to work, how to live, all by themselves. Baba didn’t notice when, in our rented car trips around Germany and France, I’d roll my pants up into shorts and sit smugly on my seat. Or at least, with his eyes in the rear-view mirror, he pretended not to.

You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.
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Baba’s “exposure” showed me that there were opportunities for women in cultures different from ours. As we visited bookstores abroad, my mother, beautiful and passive, introduced me to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton’s works, books she had reveled in herself throughout childhood. On car trips around the glittering lakes of Lugano and Lucerne, I read about Matilda’s victory over Ms. Trunchbull, Sophie’s adventures with the BFG, Anne and George’s explorations of Kirrin Island in The Famous Five, and this new, literary world seemed to unravel before me.

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl. Still, to my eight-year-old self, societal boundaries seemed malleable and time-bound, and I continued my readings in the hope that when I grew up, I’d have equal opportunities to pursue my dreams as the boys my age would have too.

Funnily enough, my resolution didn’t waver with time, and three years ago, at eighteen, with my reasonable grades and no marriage proposals, I began to think of a career as a writer. On a high after finishing A Hundred Years of Solitude one night at 4 a.m., I decided what the hell—I wanted to write well, with expertise and precision. But first, I wanted to study great literary works in depth, maybe at a good university, maybe even…abroad (Pakistani universities don’t offer a degree in English).

My mind began to spin wildly. Why not apply abroad to the best institute, maybe to Oxford or Cambridge? You won’t get in anyway, I told myself. But the vertigo continued. What was the harm in trying?

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl.
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So a week later, when everyone was fast asleep, I switched my computer on, dimmed the study lights, and hastily applied to Cambridge. A month later, when I got the call that they’d like to interview me, my eyes nearly popped out. I asked Baba to take me to Cambridge for the interview. He downright refused, but he didn’t reprimand me for secretly applying, or punish me for it. Baba was relatively open-minded compared to the System. After seeing the tears in my eyes and my relentless persistence, he agreed—with a condition: if I did get in, there was no guarantee that I’d actually go.

We trod the Cambridge grounds in a cold December wind amid rustling fallen leaves. There were six other girls for the interview—from Paris, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.K. We discussed The Weeknd’s latest music, and Netflix’s Stranger Things. I was excited, confident, and thoroughly comfortable. The interviews, each thirty minutes long, turned into more of a literary chat. Two interviewers sat opposite me on mahogany chairs. We discussed my personal statement, analyzed Mansfield and Keats, made jokes about how the lack of sunlight affected our literary mood. When I was free to go, I felt satiated. Content. I knew I’d tried.

Two months later, while browsing through my junk email, I opened one that confirmed my unconditional offer from Cambridge. I fell off my chair howling. I was ecstatic, dumbfounded, but at the same time there was a touch of melancholy: I remembered Baba’s condition.

I approached Baba, whose eyes glittered with pride at the sight of my admission letter, while his head shook into a firm, “no.”

I felt crushed, ashamed, angry. I’d hoped that maybe Baba would, by some miracle, relent. I’d come too far this time, for my writing career to remain intangible—a mere dream left unlived. “Don’t you know it’s CAMBRIDGE?” I argued. “People don’t go for financial reasons, and you’re stopping me because of what the people in our community will think?” Baba’s response was always, “I supported you as much as I could, Mehreen, and I’ll continue to do so of course, but every culture has its conventions.” With a glance at Mama who stood silently in the bedroom corner, never intervening, I wailed that he was enforcing obsolete, draconian values on his daughters, and burst into tears.

After numerous arguments, I discovered Baba was more stubborn than I’d expected him to be. At times, I felt desperate enough to imagine myself grabbing my passport and running away. I envisioned Baba’s voice breaking on the other end when I’d eventually call him from Cambridge. In my mind, he’d take it on himself for exposing us to that “Western” culture, and would finally give me his blessing (and the university’s tuition fees).

Yet I admit, I’m glad I didn’t run away. Cambridge or not, it wasn’t worth leaving my family. Baba tried to make amends with hugs and gifts, which I accepted. He was still my father after all.

Four months after I’d received the Cambridge offer, a “good” proposal came. His name was Ali. He was well-established, twenty-six (six years older than I was), and according to my family, a genuine guy. Knowing I wouldn’t go to Cambridge, and still bitter with my family for their treatment of me, I hesitantly accepted. I wanted a new start, a different environment, some time to heal—even if it was under the “protection” of another man. Two years later, last August, Ali and I entered an arranged marriage.

Every culture has its conventions.
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Post-marriage, I learned to love and respect Ali for his easygoing nature and his unwavering care for me. He was open-minded, more so than Baba, and was comfortable with my having a writing career, even if I were to attend fiction writing workshops both locally and abroad. Inevitably, we discussed the Cambridge topic, and I confided how big of a blow that was to my career. “Why so?” he replied, his gentle brown eyes unfazed and soothing. “You want to be a writer, and you can be. Cambridge isn’t the end game.”

“But…but the networking—” I spluttered. The contacts! The teaching! How could I be a writer without all that?

Ali insisted that I was making it about Cambridge, not about my writing, which is what really mattered. As he spoke, I tried to listen. Virginia Woolf didn’t go to Cambridge. Shakespeare wasn’t well educated either. Maybe I would have to work harder than other people, put in more years, enroll in a local university…but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be a writer.

With time, I learned to empathize with my family and their decision, accepting that Baba was only a product of his environment. Both he and Mama were firm in their orthodox beliefs. Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard their own culture in an alien world.

Yet I can feel hot winds of change around me. Pakistani society is learning and developing from the globalized importance of education and independence. With events like Malala’s Educate Girls campaigns, and #timesup, the current generations—including myself and Ali—yearn to give space and independence to each other and teach our offspring the same.

But of course, Cambridge is an opportunity lost that I still regret. Sometimes when I’m staring at the computer blankly during writing sessions, I long for the warmth of ancient fireplaces, the rusty smells of centuries-old libraries, the meandering and brilliant discussions with tutors, communal meals with my peers…

Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard my parents' own culture in an alien world.
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Then, I look at pictures of Ali and me, hand in hand at our wedding, while Baba stands with an unabashed smile in the background. I tell myself that Cambridge was my road not taken, and life deals you cards that you to learn to manage instead of getting depressed over. In my case, my gender and cultural values obstructed me from having the same opportunities as boys my age did. I can either hate it and run from it or confront it and hope for change.

Still, I realize that in this time and society, I need the blessings of men around me in order to establish myself. These men might be supportive and kind-hearted—like Baba, and Ali—but I yearn for the freedom, the authority, and independence that women like Jane Eyre, Jo March and Hester Prynne craved, albeit in different shades and tones than my own longings. And, every time I pick up my pen, I take on these societal structures can only be altered by awareness and exposure, which come from lots and lots of reading. And writing.

For now, as students my age savor their goodbye hugs and farewell parties before leaving for universities abroad, I glance at a crisp, white letter on my right—my Cambridge acceptance—then at the wedding ring on my left hand.

And I know I won’t be among them.

As a woman who makes a living putting pen to paper, my second worst fear is that I will communicate so poorly that I’m misunderstood (I’ll leave you to guess what the worst fear is). So I have a certain amount of empathy for Ross Douthat fretting about that very thing after a severe backlash to his latest New York Times column, entitled “The Redistribution of Sex.” My empathy went out like a tide when I recalled that, in typical fashion, he refuses to be honest about the implications of his crypto-misogynistic thought experiments.

In the piece, he argues that while leftists and feminists are opposed to the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, this is a natural and logical outcome of societies that “look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.” As he sees it, our vaunted sexual revolution means that we are inevitably sliding towards the society yearned for by mass-murdering misogynists like Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, because we have imbued sex with so much value — both personal and political — in the wake of the 1960s.

This has been mischaracterized as Douthat arguing in favor of the “incels’” ideal world. He doesn’t, but this is hardly exculpatory. While the caricature of Douthat’s argument misses the particulars, it nevertheless captures the spirit of a piece that is resolutely androcentric and utterly ignorant of sexual culture.

This Is The Story Of The Story I Can’t Write
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Although Douthat is not in favor of this proposed redistribution, by entertaining the idea at all and going so far as to propose it as an inevitable dystopia (which, really, is the fault of us damn feminists for wanting too much sexual choice) he nevertheless embraces fundamental aspects of a worldview shared by reactionary malefactors like incels and men’s rights activists. It all starts with the “sexual hierarchy” that he and other writers have cited as a social problem that gives rise to incel terrorism. In short, they can’t get dates or get laid, so they blame women and society at large; inevitably, some act out violently. But accepting this argument is to take the embittered propaganda of these communities at face value. There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.

Thus, without endorsing their ends, Douthat endorses an MRA view of sexuality. He simply proposes a more conservative solution, arguing “that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence.”

“The sexual revolution,” he argues, “created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration.” This is strikingly similar to an equally credulous analysis advanced by the nominally leftist thinker Angela Nagle, who writes:

“Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.”

Pun unintended, I’m certain. Nagle’s words, which even more explicitly regurgitate MRA-ish talking points about sexual elites and celibacy, were passed around after the Toronto massacre by other leftists as “a perceptive point” about these men who keep killing women en masse. What Nagle and Douthat share, aside from being all too willing to take the promoters of these extreme views at face value, is an argument that fails to account for the existence of women and queer people.

There’s a difference between understanding that a worldview can shape behavior, and implying that the worldview is factually correct.
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In short, we have a good A/B test available to us that suggests the problem isn’t sex and who’s getting it, but how different groups conceive of their entitlement to it, and what they do about it.

So let’s break this down.

There’s a sexual hierarchy, but nerdy young white guys aren’t the only ones on the wrong side of it.

It is striking to me that these conversations proceed almost entirely without discussing women who are perceived of as sexually undesirable. Fat women, disabled women, nerdy women, non-white women, trans women, all fall short of beauty standards that are structured by prejudices as much as the advent of the “sexual revolution.”

Douthat does mention this when he tries to use a recent essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan to buttress his argument, where he notes that Srinivasan makes the exact point I just made, but then breezes over its implications entirely except to suggest — bizarrely — that she implies sexually undesirable minorities must someday be redressed by the very “redistribution” feminists find so appalling. Neither Srinivasan, nor myself, nor indeed anyone in that milieu has ever made that argument nor sought to imply it. Douthat was undaunted: “This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex,” he says of Srinivasan’s argument, “…but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.”

This is speculation in its purest form and it mistakes analysis of ideology (recognizing that norms of attractiveness and desirability are highly politically charged) for a proposal of a “redistributive” solution. But beyond this, it also ignores the elephant in the room. If all of these groups experience a certain dislocation and loneliness from being on the wrong side of sexual hierarchies, why aren’t we awash in mass murderers from those groups? Where are the lonely, nerdy women who kill because they can’t get a date on Tinder? Where are all the black women mowing down pedestrians in a rental van because society’s beauty standards aggressively privilege whiteness? In failing to grapple with this, every writer who entertains incel/MRA ideology, even as a mere thought experiment, makes a catastrophic analytical error.

Being at the bottom of a sexual hierarchy does not mean you don’t have sex.

This is another point that should be obvious but has, apparently, been lost in the vacuous prattle that followed the Toronto killings. Society has hegemonic norms, but people violate them constantly and form microcultures. As an autistic transgender woman with non-white features, I’m certainly on the “wrong” side of a few beauty hierarchies in this society and I pay a price for that; I still have sex and two very committed partners with whom I share very deep connections.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright. This doesn’t even begin to grapple with how your individual notions of attractiveness, honed over the years by uniquely personal experiences, may affect things. Hierarchies of desirability do have an impact, but not necessarily on the practical outcome of whether or not you have sex. It may affect your ability to feel sexy, and hurt your self-esteem of course; goddess knows I’ve been there. But that’s less about your ability to have sex, than it is how you feel about yourself and what struggles emerge from that. Through it all, people from every position on the “hierarchy” still manage to frequently find meaningful and exciting relationships.

Sexual hierarchies can be fluid and micrological. In some communities, they may even be reversed outright.
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Even a casual glance in your own social circles will reveal many happily bonded people who, in one way or another, are considered socially undesirable or “unattractive” by the ruthless metrics of conventional beauty standards. Meanwhile, our media is saturated with the image of “unattractive” men who are loved deeply by conventionally attractive women; it’s the conceit of a dozen and one sitcoms and it does reflect a partial reality where men who look like, say, Kevin James are quite capable of finding loving relationships. (I say “partial” because, naturally, it fails to reflect what life is like for women of all shapes and sizes.)

In short…

Sexual hierarchies aren’t really about sex.

They’re wired in to all manner of socio-economic and political mores, certainly, but bear only a passing relationship to your actual ability to find dates and slap your genitals against someone else’s. Rather, they are norms about social value which determine other aspects of your reality that are untethered to your sex life. For women, those who are seen as conventionally attractive will have to endure constant imprecations about their careers — “is she sleeping her way to the top?” will haunt her every step, and her beauty will be taken as blanket consent for everything from drawing porn of heragainst her will to dismissing her point of view to undervaluing her accomplishments.

The Case For BDSM As A Feminist Manifesto In Art
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Conventionally “unattractive” women, meanwhile, will be ruthlessly mocked and derided by men (including incels — just look at what they say about women they deem undesirable, impervious to irony as reactionary bigots often must be). Such women may be ignored outright or deemed unworthy of making even professional connections with, seen as uncharismatic, unhealthy, or shamed for what they look like.

This is all, indeed, a function of the sexual hierarchy; but it’s markedly unrelated to one’s sex life as such. Which brings me to the final point…

Sex will not cure these extremists.

Implicit in arguments like Nagle’s and Douthat’s is the idea that if only these lonely nerd boys got laid more often, maybe the victims in Isla Vista or Toronto would be alive today.

There’s no evidence to suggest this is the case.

Men who hate women will continue to hate us, and hurt us, no matter how much sex they’re having. Domestically abusive men are often having sex with the partners they assault, after all. Meanwhile men like Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes were, indeed, raping countless women. These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power. In fact, as heterosexual men who were married they were, to a large extent, living Douthat’s ideal. But, if anything, their abuses begat more of the same; nothing was ever enough, and each new assault seemed only to feed a void that grew into the prodigious litany of crimes that each man is now justly infamous for.

These men were getting the sex they wanted, at the expense of women who were forced into silent submission to their power.
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The cancer must be cut out from the root. Implying, as so many often do, that the solution is to “give” sex to men like Minassian is merely to feed the lust of insatiable loathing. The problem is not that they aren’t having enough sex; the problem is that they despise women, and will do so no matter how much sex they’re having.

The proposition that sex is “unequally distributed,” which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim. Being outside of hegemonic beauty norms does not inherently deny you love or sex; your place in that hierarchy instead shapes other things untethered to your actual sex life.

Yet this dubious claim has legs because, as ever, we must privilege the perspective of the loudest and angriest men as worth consideration. The scope of their entitlement determines the seriousness with which we must take their worldview, however horribly skewed it may be. Thus, lightly laundered mainstream interpretations of this worldview linger, despite the obviously dehumanizing implication of likening women to a currency or resource that must be paternalistically apportioned by the powers that be.

Douthat laments that progressives seem to be demanding that “the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states.” But by disingenuously linking these two things, he poisons the discussion he claims to want to have. Asexual people, after all, don’t figure into Douthat’s argument. Yet, as a political force, they’ve argued very forcefully against the idea of compulsory sexuality — and done so in a way that neither shades into anti-feminism, nor into arguing that the sexual revolution was some kind of mistake. Theirs is a call for greater pluralism, a far cry from Douthat’s lustful homogenization.

The proposition that sex is ‘unequally distributed,’ which is taken for granted in all of these chin-stroking arguments, is a highly contestable claim.
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It’s old hat by now to claim that crimes like Rodger’s or Minassian’s are the fault of growing liberalization, that somehow women’s choice has left some men so forlorn that they can only resort to murder. There is no way to take this argument seriously without courting a misogynistic worldview that stands ignorant of even obvious facts. Even if Douthat is worried about the coming of a “redistributive” sexual culture, such concerns are founded on the hot air of hyper-ideological drivel that he had no business entertaining in one of the nation’s largest newspapers. But I can see why he did: His preferred prescription for us would see — as always — women and queer people stripped of our rights and, presumably, forced into straight and monogamous relationships. In the end, Douthat does seem to believe in “redistribution,” just of an altogether different sort to produce a society akin to his fantasy of the 1950s.

In the end, all that needs to be said is this: Incels and their ilk do indeed believe they’re entitled to sex, and that such contact would cure them of all that ails them, sparing society from their wrath and vengeance.

We do not have to take them at their word.

More than half of all female homicide victims in the United States are killed by their intimate partner. On June 8, 2013, my mother became a part of this statistic.

In one defining moment, my father, with full consciousness, shot multiple bullets into my mother’s chest. Even as she lay there dead, he kept shooting. As is the case for so many, the murder followed years of abuse.

As someone working in the domestic violence advocacy field, I want to be able to share my experience, to educate people and push for crucial change. But as the daughter of Libyan Muslim immigrants to the United States, I have often felt the need to show caution.

I want to prevent, to as great of an extent as possible, perpetuating damning stereotypes about Muslim men and women.

As a Muslim woman, I am often faced with overt Islamophobic aggressions — and these often come from my fellow domestic violence advocates. In my first month working at a shelter in the Bay Area, an advocate remarked that a young Egyptian Muslim mother’s suicidal tendencies reminded her of ISIS suicide bombers. Another time, when the shelter hosted a faith conference on domestic violence, I inquired whether any Muslim faith leaders would be a part of the conversation — and one of the facilitators of the event stated that she had not thought to invite any. She then asked me whether Muslim women are even allowed to talk.

The Fear And Guilt Of Being A Muslim After A Terror Attack

Lila Abu-Lughod, an Arab-American anthropologist who has written extensively on Orientalism as it pertains to Muslim women, expresses how the West has been obsessed with Muslim women and their perceived oppression since 9/11. In her exploration of the Western image of Muslim women and Islam, Abu-Lughod cites a “moral crusade” that has successfully positioned Muslim women as submissive and in need of saving, and Muslim men as spectacularly violent and patriarchal. I remained silent about my father’s actions out of a fear of lending legitimacy to these racist tropes.

In the wake of my mother’s death, I became enraged — at my community, at my father, and at myself. My experiences with racism and Islamophobia as a North African Muslim girl growing up in post-9/11 America, amplified by my mother’s visibly Muslim identity, reinforced in me the need to protect my community.

For a considerable part of my life, Islamophobia informed my mother’s silence, and mine.

About those stereotypes.

It’s true that Muslim women experience abuse at the hands of their intimate partners — however, the same holds true for women in the West. Nordic countries, for instance — despite being some of the most gender-equal countries in the world — still suffer disproportionately high rates of intimate partner violence. In the European Union, the average rate of the lifetime prevalence of intimate partner violence is 22%. In Sweden, the rate is 28%; in Finland, 30%; and in Denmark, 32%. In the United States, one in four women will suffer severe violence at the hands of their intimate partners in their lifetime. (These numbers closely mirror a survey of Muslims in the U.S. that found that 31% reported having experienced intimate partner abuse.)

I remained silent about my father’s actions out of a fear of lending legitimacy to racist tropes.
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What is unique is the presence of distinct cultural norms that make it especially difficult for Muslim women in the U.S. to report abuse or seek help. Ruksana Ayyub, a researcher on domestic violence, conducted a survey within the South Asian Muslim community and found that at least one in four women were dealing with domestic violence. Ayyub notes, however, that the numbers are probably much higher.

What the American populace is most often impervious to is the ways in which Islamophobia — through surveillance programs, incessant negative portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in mainstream media, and excessive news coverage of crimes committed by Muslims — has acted to reinforce and proliferate the abuse that is suffered by Muslim women at the hands of their intimate partners. Because of Islamophobia, Muslim women are encouraged to be silent about their abuse so as to not contribute to the further demonization of their faith and communities.

My community’s subsequent response to my mother’s death, or lack thereof, revealed how this can manifest. My mother Nadia, like most other Muslim immigrants to the United States, had her strongest roots at the mosque. She was beloved in our community, known for her exceptional cooking and shrewdness. But though her funeral brought together people that I had not seen in over a decade, celebrating her and her life, not once did anyone blame my father for what he did. Everyone wrote off his choice to kill my mother as a psychological illness, as a whisper from the devil, ignoring a reality that had been building up for years prior. Denial made the reality a bit easier to bear on each side — as a community, and as a targeted group in the United States.

Similarly, my mother, strong as she was, harbored reservations about disclosing her abuse to those within the Muslim community and outside it. I have inherited these same reservations from her, as there is a very real fear that my mother’s murder will be blamed on our culture and faith rather than on a culture of patriarchy and violence — a culture which America is hardly exempt from.

There is a very real fear that my mother’s murder will be blamed on our culture and faith rather than on a culture of patriarchy and violence .
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This silence is further compounded by the fact that Muslim women who are victims of abuse in America lack options when it comes to seeking help. As our places of worship continue to be surveilled, and racial profiling remains widespread in airports, law enforcement is deeply mistrusted. In New York, for example, the Police Department’s Intelligence Division has overseen a surveillance program since at least 2002 that involves mapping predominantly Muslim communities throughout New York City, providing photo and video surveillance of mosques, and keeping an intelligence database on thousands of innocent New York Muslims.

Even domestic violence centers specifically designed to help those in need often fail to adequately serve Muslim women, thanks to a lack of cultural education and training among advocates. In a study published in Journal of Social Work Research and Evaluation, an overwhelming 46.7% of Arab women who were victims of intimate partner violence agreed or strongly agreed that there were not any domestic violence programs or services that were established to cater to the particular needs of Arab immigrant women.

Asra Milani, a Canadian researcher on Muslim women domestic violence victims, expressed how Muslim clients seeking help from shelters may harbor feelings of suspicion or uncertainty in the presence of domestic violence advocates. Furthermore, Milani states that Muslims who are in need of mental health services “may be reluctant not only to seek services, but to express fears and problems in their lives created by Islamophobia.”

If Muslim women facing intimate partner violence cannot be comfortable in places established explicitly to assist abused women, then there is little faith that there is any place else for them.

Muslim women are constantly othered and dehumanized, their narratives fabricated in ways that intend to rob them of sympathy and needed actions to create change.

Perhaps what has infuriated me most since my mother was killed is the fact that no one calls what claimed her life by its name. No one says that it was patriarchy that killed her. No one talks about domestic violence as a public health epidemic. No one cares to break the silence around domestic violence in the Muslim community, even in the face of such a personal loss. No one seeks to draw connections between patriarchal indoctrination and my mother being brutally murdered by her husband.

No one talks about domestic violence as a public health epidemic.
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Though it is true that all Muslims in the U.S. are deeply affected by Islamophobia, Muslim women continue to suffer the greatest loss: loss of agency, loss of power, and loss of life. There is also a grave cost to Muslim communities when voicing issues is discouraged. If Muslim women are to be vocal about their abuse, the inimical culture of Islamophobia cannot exist. Islamophobia informs the silence of abused Muslim women; that silence, in turn, is killing us.

There is a price to pay if we speak out. There is a price to pay if we do not. But if there is any prospect of saving our lives, we must know that our silence will not save us. Central to our livelihoods is that the culture of Islamophobia be dismantled. Without this, Muslim women lose access to the services that exist for abused women. Without this, Muslim women will, unjustly, continue to choose between protecting their faith and communities, or protecting themselves.

Nour Naas is at the beginning of a project which seeks to lend a platform to marginalized women, with a particular focus on Muslim women, who have experienced intimate partner violence. If you are interested in learning more about it or becoming a participant, you can contact Nour directly at dvpinquiries@gmail.com.

This is the story of the story I can’t write.

The “#MeToo moment” has cut a righteous swathe through the elite, bringing down once unassailable men in entertainment, news, and the world of politics. The legions of us it united became 2017’s Person of the Year, fitting for so desolate a year that we women who yelled out “Enough!” in unison should be esteemed for it. I have #MeToo stories I’ve not gone public with in any detail. But they’re not what this piece is about.

Rather, this story is about what lurks in the penumbra of #MeToo, what is occluded by the press coverage and the jokes (so very many late night jokes) about the sexual dimension of male power. Power, as a whole, remains in the shadows.

A few women have tried to bring this more complex analysis forward. Journalist Melissa Gira Grant, for instance, wrote for The New York Review of Books about how sexual harassment is a projection of power, rather than something purely sexual. “Sex has overshadowed harassment,” she writes. But this moment points to larger, more systemic issues of men in power silencing and marginalizing those they dominate — whether or not they use sex to do so.

Power, as a whole, remains in the shadows.
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“[W]omen are not supposed to let on that we know how power works,” Grant writes, “Consciously or not, we know how rote male dominance is, and that it often feels like nothing. It is the weather, and it is a form of discipline.”

This was a subtle but powerful point that was also made by Rebecca Carroll, a journalist who produced Charlie Rose for years. She wrote for Esquire about her experience of Rose’s racism. Describing a “toxic and degrading” environment, she recalled how Rose tokenized her for being black, and belittled her for forwarding innovative ideas on how to discuss race on Rose’s program. “If I pushed back on anything race-related, I was silenced or punished,” she wrote, adding that after she suggested a panel discussing the history of the slave trade to frame a piece on the movie Amistad, he became “so irate that he cancelled the whole segment and didn’t assign me anything else for days.”

“It was an environment that all but erased me, while simultaneously exploiting me as a black woman,” Carroll wrote. “I felt like an exotic anomaly he could move around the chessboard at his whim — and I was supposed be grateful for it.” None of Rose’s behavior toward her was sexual, notably. It was a parallel form of toxicity that degraded her, specifically, for being a black woman. But would Carroll be considered part of this “moment,” then? Even when her story feels so central to what #MeToo is really about? It exposes a form of male power and entitlement that imbricates deeply with a white supremacist power structure. We should not be surprised that Rose’s intense misogyny was twinned with racism, after all. Lest we forget, Harvey Weinstein tried to publicly discredit only two of his accusers: Lupita Nyong’o and Salma Hayek.

Yet Carroll’s story points the way to a larger understanding of white and male power. This isn’t about sex. As Grant, writes: “Our conflict is not over sex, or with men in particular or in general, but over power.” The even more challenging point she makes is that this reckoning should not just be about whether we “feel” violated, or pained, which reduces everything to a personal experience and slots neatly into the trope of tearful white woman as victim who must be rescued (and thus the only person whose harms must be, narrowly, redressed). Rather, it is about the fact of our power being reduced, our time being frittered away, our energy being spent on “dealing with” our abusers, our careers dissolving through it all against our will.

And thus we come to the story I can’t tell.

Whisper networks have been in the news lately, but they don’t just exist for discussing sexual predators. Marginalized folk of all genders have networks where we discuss other kinds of malefactors — not all of them men, but most of them white, certainly. They are people who prey on us; we’re resources to them — “informants,” “sources,” even when we’re actually supposed to be colleagues. We may be “inspiration,” or “muses,” colorful little characters in a story with a punchy headline. But we are never ourselves.

Once we outlive our usefulness we become so much trash to be dumped, and we are perpetually reminded that, whatever qualifications we hold, whatever we’ve done in our fields, whatever our titles, we are not their equals.

It’s the white cis woman who tells me that she loves my work but that she’s just so disappointed in my anger over her prejudicial statements on trans people; and she makes sure all of her (much larger) base of followers is aware of that. It’s the white cis man whose personal brand controls a newsroom with such force that it could turn an entire city against a trans activist who complained about unfair coverage. It’s the white trans man in a prominent community perch who gatekeeps the careers of so many aspiring trans women while degrading their talents in private, glorying in his power over them. In each of those cases, we had to smile, bow politely, and commit our time and energy to smoothing things over. We withdrew a little bit more of ourselves from public life, devoted more of what was left to mollifying them.

On Spacey, Weinstein, Milo, And The Weaponization Of Identity
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I think also of the man who essays from a prominent media platform about the supposed threat posed by trans women like me. Liberal concern trolling, if you like. I have the temerity to publicly criticise him on social media, while speaking to another woman.

Before long, I find a furious email from him in my inbox angrily accusing me of spreading lies, belittling my professional qualifications and claims to expertise. Shut up and go away, he said. And yet months before, he had taken to social media to loudly denounce me, and spuriously accused me of professional malpractice to all of his followers, not a few of whom were in my line of work. I couldn’t send him an angry email of course.

That required power I simply do not possess.

Each of these cases is marked in a graveyard of text files that may never see the light of publication. Each case is marked by a singular lack of singularity — there are other people who’ve been harassed by the powerful folks in question, after all. But they don’t want to, or can’t, come forward. There’s never enough critical mass of testimony to go to press; without their story, there is no story.

Thus I’m so often alone with the man in the inbox.

He emailed more than once— because of course he did. It’s his privilege to vent to me in a manner unbecoming of his profession, to try and isolate me in a dark corner of my inbox. Who knows, he may recognize himself in this story and email me yet again.

My role in his life is that of a strange helpmate; a sounding board for his anxieties about his targets talking back.

There are other people who’ve been bullied by the powerful folks in question. But they don’t want to, or can’t, come forward.
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I was not hurt by these emails, I wasn’t even sad. The first time I tried a little emotional labor — who among us, as women, hasn’t felt the need to soothe a man who is yelling at us? That’s what you do, right? The second time, I merely rolled my eyes and didn’t respond. This is a man who sought to make claim on my psyche, deliberately preyed on my insecurities, and tried to poison my profession against me. Because I’m a trans woman with an “agenda.” That had to be put down; I could not be regarded as an expert or an equal, only a shallow fraud who needed to be silenced.

Another man, with another email, sent after a talk I gave at a major professional conference. He started off by asking me not to make his words public before he launched into a belittling tirade about how awful I was for not including slides in my presentation and how he’d “never seen so many people walk out of a talk” before. I was at the podium, I saw the crowd, and the statistical feedback, I heard the exact opposite about that talk from so many people, and thus I knew all the ways he was wrong. But he still wanted to make a claim on my consciousness, eroding my expertise to feel more secure in his own.

This, then, is about all the bitter little ways our power — as women of color, as queer people — is diminished. It hangs together with quotidian online harassment from people who seek to reduce you to a witless ethnic stereotype; my favorite was an angry gamer calling me “Home Depot Anita Sarkeesian,” get it? Because I’m Latina? Hi-larious. But when slightly more highbrow variations on that theme come from your white male “peers,” it takes on a different shape because they really have the power to degrade your professional standing.

When A Woman Deletes A Man’s Comment Online
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It’s worse when they think they’re on your side. A cis man wants to be regarded as an ally of trans people; I explain why his ideas are actually transphobic, he responds by trying to erase me and telling the world I have no credentials to question him. In private, he condemns me; he casts me as the aggressor, says I am unprofessional, that I have no claim to any expertise on, say, online harassment or trans rights. He’s the real victim. As it so often is with the men whose heads you must sympathetically pat while they scream at you. Keep yourself safe by playing your preordained role in the drama he’s scripted, fret your hour on his stage, move on.

I’m not hurt — much less “violated” in any sense. But time and energy that could’ve gone into other things is now lost to the four winds. And I have to be concerned about what all those emailing men, the ones who don’t want me to reveal their splenetic rantings, could do to my reputation in the public sphere they so comfortably own.

And I must emphasize here: None of this behavior was sexual. None of the anonymized stories I’ve told here are about sexual harassment. But these people abuse their power in the same way; certain white people and men try to control the narrative in public, while cribbing you in private, making sure you can’t say what happened there. The consequences will be yours to reap, after all. You’ll be unprofessional if you come forward. You’ll get sued.

Keep yourself safe by playing your preordained role in the drama he’s scripted, fret your hour on his stage, move on.
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#MeToo has already become a vast and sprawling conversation about complex, important issues regarding sex crimes. But there is connective tissue between sexual harassment and platonic forms of abuse, for each is rooted in a privilege no one should have. This is a venerable feminist insight that should not be forgotten.

“If it wasn’t about sex, why didn’t he just hit her?” asked Catharine A. MacKinnon, when trying to sort out whether rape was motivated more by sex or generic power. Like so many of her points, this aphorism is so simple as to seem inarguable, but it won’t reckon with the people who do hit us, or who try to destroy us without laying a finger on us.

Sociologically, it is more sensible to see sexual terror as existing on a continuum with abuses of every other kind of power, every other kind of social interaction. The point of abuse, and why it’s so insidious, is that it takes the material of ordinary life and turns it into a weapon: touch, sex, communication, privacy. These things are not inherently evil; their uses can be. Sometimes that use is neither violent nor violating, it just causes you to wither.

Grant’s essay reminded me of this. In a media economy that prizes women’s suffering as an Ur currency, it helps to be reminded that exercises of power don’t need to “hurt” to be harmful. Just because you can’t “sell” your story doesn’t mean it’s not important or informative.

The point of abuse, and why it’s so insidious, is that it takes the material of ordinary life and turns it into a weapon.
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It’s vital to recognize that feelings are real and worth respecting, but we must be wary of the ways in which our stories are commodified as trauma porn for safe consumption. The larger fight? It’s not about feelings, but actual diminishment of real power: power over my time, my life, my work.

Back in the whisper networks a familiar dialogue proceeds. “Watch out for him,” “He creeped me out too,” “He does this to everyone,” “I got receipts,” “He came after me when I said x.” It’s all we can do to keep ourselves safe, and to retain the modicum of power that comes with knowing you aren’t alone. Same as it ever was.

Through it all, certain people will try to deny your power, or your ability to connect their fell deeds to a fell system.

They demand privacy because they know that “privacy” individualizes your story, makes it “he said she said” drama, and keeps it away from the bright lights of a larger analysis that would suggest these men aren’t the towering gods they think they are, but so many interchangeable parts in a larger machine.

We Shouldn’t Focus On How Men Feel About Female Victimization
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The strangely viral New Yorker short story, “Cat Person,” serves as a case in point — not just for how it sharply divided opinion along gender lines, but for the fact that so very many people, even those who approved, thought the story was an “article.” So commodified are our personal stories that something labeled FICTION in bright red ink was still presumed to be a “confessional” essay. Non-fic chick lit. It’s just so gratingly difficult to conceive of women’s experience of sexism, however subtle, as an analysis (or as art) rather than a personal story.

The confessional form itself, like its Catholic forebear, is a suffocating space where you submit to anonymous male judgement. There is no real redemption, and you are not allowed to survey, or assess, or judge for yourself.

Thus, on the one hand, you can read this essay as tragic, for it confines abusers’ identities to whisper networks. And, indeed, their anonymity is an exercise of power. On the other hand this form has been liberating: This isn’t a lurid drama of pain and tears which must, invariably, center the abusers as co-stars. This is about territory I’m more comfortable in: analyzing social structure, as a woman qualified to do so, regardless of what my emailing “friends” preferred me to believe.

There’s a reason that Rep. Maxine Waters’ invocation of parliamentary procedure, “I’m reclaiming my time,” spoken during a committee meeting where she was being interrupted and talked over by a white man, has gained immortality as an anti-racist/feminist slogan. The resources sapped from us by white patriarchy are that fundamental, and daring to reclaim them assertively remains a painfully radical act.

One day, perhaps, I’ll learn to reclaim mine.

The vagina! If it’s dank and dark; if it’s a gap, a space, a vent, a chink in my armor, a damp rupture, a drip drip dripping leak, a pink rupture, a perforation; if it’s a joyful gash, a ruffled crevice, an angry bellowing fissure . . .

Then what is a penis?

A long bump? A preposterous outcrop, a slender jutting ledge? A cylindrical shelf perhaps. A beige ridge, a swelling protuberance, a warm-blooded obtrusion.

Is it always a weapon?

When talking about sex, it is nearly impossible not to talk about power. And when you are talking about heterosexual penetrative sex, it’s impossible not to talk about the penis. And when you talk about the penis, it’s impossible not to wonder if it’s our enemy, the very nexus of The Patriarchy at which we all rage.

And while this algebra — the phallus serving as a symbol of women’s oppression, predicated on the axiom that women are “the lesser sex” — feels like a logical way to add things up, I want no part of these calculations.

Such equations are reductive at best, dangerous at worse. Making a particular genital synonymous with a particular gender—which in turn places said human at the center at The Problem—doesn’t add up, as it were. The simple fact that some people in possession of a penis don’t benefit from the patriarchy at all—or suffer even more horribly than your average cishet white gal like me—undermines the central premise of this math.

Moreover, I don’t want my power predicated on someone else’s subjugation or humiliation. I don’t want the re-appropriation of power — don’t misunderstand me, I am coming for my rightful share — to come at the cost of degrading others. Or their genitals.

I get the impetus. I have violent urges to exact revenge — sexual and otherwise — a lot. I want to patronize, demean, infantilize, hyper-sexualize, and underpay the cis men I meet all the goddamn time. I want to make them feel small. Scared. I want them to shirk and try to cover themselves.

But amid that reptilian muck, I am wrestling with a belief that rings truer and better (in line with who I am and strive to be) and that’s the notion that violence — metaphysical or otherwise — begets more violence.

If I am deriving — in part — my feminine power from my (utter) delight in sex and said delight comes from the penis, I am forced to acknowledge that I adore the penis, as I adore the person to whom it’s attached.

I cannot hold all penises accountable for the wretched men that have used them to intimidate and violate, those who’ve gleaned delusional — and literal — power from a world that worships the phallus.

Can one worship the icon and loathe its creators?

The penis’ softness, its pliability — like warm clay or dough — when flaccid, is so, so lovely.

I love its roundness, its plumpness. I love stroking it until it’s throbbing against my palm. I love its purple-pink-brown veins, I love the blood coursing through them; I can almost hear my heartbeat in time with the rush of their crimson thrummings.

I love the coupling of power and subjugation when I take him in my mouth. I’m kneeling and his hand presses my head forward — not hard, but not without force — and I can’t quite breath enough, but just for a moment.

We’re eliciting small, joyish sounds from one another — mine are muffled with his flesh; his are breathy, growling. He’s poised between my teeth and I am keenly aware of the tiny beast inside of me who won’t bite — but could — and the tiny brute inside him who won’t use my vulnerability against me — but could.

We’re suspended, mutually sacrificing and taking power.

bell hooks has a really wonderful essay called “Penis Passion” in which she briefly traces the evolution of feminism in relation to the penis and how her own power is no longer predicated on denigrating the phallus — or fearing it.

She says that throughout the ’60s and ‘70s:

“in feminist consciousness-raising groups, we…talked about how women had to become more comfortable with words like pussy and cunt. So that men could not terrify or shame us by wielding these words as weapons, we also had to be able to talk about cock and dick with the same ease. Sexual liberation had already told us that if we wanted to please a man we had to become comfortable with blow jobs, with going down, with the dick in our throat so far down it hurt. Surrendering our sexual agency, we had to swallow the pain and pretend it was really pleasure.”

There is a use of violence against the violator in an attempt to negate the original violence. But again, this algebra feels wrong to me, if natural. hooks too explains her own movement away from this urge to sacrifice oneself on the altar of patriarchal sex to prove we’re just as powerful — that the altar is now ours too — when perhaps, we should be dismantling that altar entirely.

“Naming how we sexually engage male bodies, and most particularly the penis, in ways that affirm gender equality and further feminist liberation of males and females is the essential act of sexual freedom. When women and men can celebrate the beauty and power of the phallus in ways that do not uphold male domination, our erotic lives are enhanced.”

I want to name it. I want to sing a slippery ode to the sliding sensation of the penis, gliding between my legs slick as an otter; its damp fur makes a scratching sound against mine. I like it when his penis is the first thing inside me. I can feel my body give way around him — I wince with pleasure. It feels like stretching after a long run.

I like the way it moves and rises to meet me. I like the way it flexes and reacts to my breath, my glance, my tongue running its length. I like its proudness, its boat-like prow-ness; it’s leading its tired captain to the sandy shores of my sheets.

I like its strength; I like the way it can slap my mound like a slender branch against a rain-streaked window.

In short? I refuse to let my pleasure be synonymous with subjugation; in my adoration of the penis I do not make myself smaller or forgo my agency.

“To identify the penis always and only with force, with being a tool of power, a weapon first and foremost, is to participate in the worship and perpetuation of patriarchy,” hook says. “It is a celebration of male domination.”

And so I will worship at an altar of my own making, devoted to neither pussy nor penis, but mutual pleasure. We’ve fashioned it from plywood and together we’re tracing the splinters in our fingers and spine as we writhe on the shrine we’ve built for one another.

The sleepovers I attended as a little kid all followed a similar pattern: We would have dinner, retreat to the family room to watch whatever movies had been rented for us, consume enormous amounts of soft drinks, and then, riding that sugar high, stay up into the wee hours of the morning giggling over anything and everything. This routine continued until shortly before we hit puberty, at which point our sleepovers took a darker turn. As soon as the rest of the family was in bed, we would abandon the family room and whatever embarrassingly babyish movie had been provided for our entertainment and instead make a beeline for the basement. There, in the chill darkness lit by a single dangling lightbulb, we would try to do magic.

Our forays into the dark arts never went further than the most standard of supernatural party tricks: daring each other to do Bloody Mary, asking the ouija boards about our futures, taking turns levitating each other using the old light as a feather, stiff as a board game. Sometimes we tried to cast spells or make voodoo dolls of our frenemies; one girl had an older sister who was Wiccan, and we would pore over her books and notes whenever we got the chance. We lit pink candles and chanted the names of boys we liked, hoping to magically persuade them to like us back. Altogether it was all pretty harmless, although at the time those sleepovers hit that perfect sweet spot between thrilling and terrifying.

I realize now that my friends and I weren’t alone in our attempts to practice witchcraft. In fact, most of the women I’ve talked to have had similar experiences — in some senses, it almost feels like a girlhood rite of passage. Certainly the tradition has a rich history. To pick a very famous example, consider the story of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, whose accusations of witchcraft sparked the Salem Witch Trials. Ten-year-old Betty and her older cousin Abigail would meet up with other young girls in Salem to practice what they called “little sorceries.”
Most of their activities centered around divining who their future husbands would be, because for a 17th century girl, the greatest indicator of how your life would play out was who you married and what social status you achieved through that marriage. To find this out, the girls used a form of ovomancy, or egg magic, called a “Venus glass,” which worked by dripping the white of an egg into a glass of water. By watching the shape the egg white took, the girls hoped to find clues about their futures.

While fortune-telling might seem to be at odds with the conservative form of Christianity practiced by the Puritans, the truth is that folk magic or, as they called it, “white magic,” was frequently (if secretly) practiced by women in early American Puritan communities. In fact, when Betty and Abigail began to experience strange fits and other signs of bewitchment — signs which appeared, interestingly enough, shortly after they’d been playing at sorcery — one of the first remedies tried was a bit of folk magic called a witch’s cake. This cake — which was suggested by the girls’ neighbor Mary Sibley — was made of rye flour mixed with urine from the afflicted girls. The cake was then fed to a dog with the hope that the dog’s behavior would somehow reveal the identity of the person bewitching the girls.

Although the intentions behind the witch cake were noble, when Betty’s father, the Reverend Samuel Parris, found out about it, he took to his pulpit to denounce Mary Sibley, calling the witch’s cake “diabolical.” Mary Sibley immediately confessed and repented; had she not, she would likely have been among those convicted and killed for witchcraft. From this story and the story of Betty and Abigail and their friends practicing divination, we can conclude two things: firstly, that charms and spells and other types of folk magic were commonly used even in strict Puritan communities, and secondly, that no matter how “white” the magic was, the women who performed it were always suspected of evil.

In the 300 years that have elapsed since the Salem Witch Trials, our preoccupation with witches hasn’t waned, although thankfully it has grown less deadly. We’re just as fascinated by witches as our ancestors — perhaps even more so. Certainly the past few years have seen a resurgence of witchesin pop culture.

These days, the terms witch or witchy cover a broad spectrum of things — it might mean someone who practices witchcraft (who may or may not align with a particular pagan or neopagan religion), but then again it might not. In some ways, 2016’s version of “witchy” might seem to refer to more of an Instagrammable aesthetic choice than anything else — wearing dark lipstick and crystal pendants, growing cute kitchen herb gardens, and arranging household altars of dried flowers and animal skulls. It’s tempting to write these things off as being merely superficial affectations, but to do so would be a grave underestimation. Beneath all that glossy packaging hums the same idea that has tantalized girls for millennia: the fact that to be a witch is to be a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless.

To be a witch is to be a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless.
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On some level, all of the contemporary trappings of witchiness tap into that desire to feel powerful. Black or dark purple lipstick might currently be in vogue, but on some level they subvert traditional feminine beauty standards and the ability to subvert or reject the status quo often confers a sense of power. To grow your own kitchen herbs and have some knowledge of herb lore are powerful in the sense that the ability to provide for yourself — even on a small scale — is a type of power. And, of course, the idea that setting out a particular arrangement of objects in a particular way with the intent of influencing real-life events is a type of power.

According to Ayşe Tuzlak, who has a PhD in religion and specializes in gender and ritual in the ancient world, it was women’s inability to obtain power through established means and their subsequent attempts to access it through other channels that informed western ideas of what it meant to be a witch:

“European Christian women in late antiquity and the Middle Ages were generally barred access to institutional power, and thus women who expressed their religiosity in unapproved ways, or in ways that were ‘too feminine’ by the standards of the culture, were branded as witches or heretics. The institutions of that time and place had certain assumptions about appropriate behavior for men and women, and what was considered real Christianity and what was not. Thus the people who had a vested interest in those institutions began to pay neurotically close attention to anything that looked ‘too feminine,’ and expanded the significance of feminine symbols — like the broom, an ordinary domestic tool — to include dangerous associations, for example flying at night to secret meetings. Because if a woman looked like she was seizing spiritual power that wasn’t hers by right, then everything “feminine” about her because suspect and morally charged.”

Witch is a highly gendered term, and like most such terms, its masculine counterparts — terms like wizard, warlock, sorcerer, or mage — do not quite mean exactly the same thing. This is not to say that witches are never men, or that men have never been killed for practicing witchcraft, but rather that the vast bulk of those accused of being witches have been women.

Witch is a highly gendered term.
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Tuzlak explains that just as the term slut — a term so gendered that people will often say man-slut if they are using it to refer to a man — says more about how a woman is viewed than it does about her sexual history, so too does the historical use of witch tell us more about how well a woman fit into contemporary gender roles than it does about her actual use of magic:

“I tend to see ‘witch’ as a social category imposed upon a woman who doesn’t fit acceptable religious categories. Which is why I usually put words like ‘witchcraft’ in scare-quotes; for me the word ‘witch’ is kind of like the word ‘slut,’ in that it’s a way to mark a woman as unacceptable and Other, rather than an objective measure of her religion or her sexual behavior. Just as you can’t tell how much sex a woman actually has by how often she’s called a slut, so also you can’t really tell anything about a woman’s religion based on whether a priest or a neighbor calls her a witch. And some women who have lots of sex or heretical opinions might pass under the radar because they can perform social acceptability in other ways.”

Given all of that, what exactly does witch mean? The term walks that tricky knife’s edge of a slur that has been reclaimed by some of the people it might be used against. How do we figure out how to balance the fact that witch is both an accusation that has been historically deadly to women, and also an identity that many find empowering? For Tuzlak, the answer lies in understanding the place the witch has traditionally occupied in cultural hierarchies:

“I tend to understand things in terms of power structures and insider/outsider status with regard to institutions. So, to use our own culture as an example, if someone offers me drugs in a carpeted office, neatly groomed, wearing a white lab coat, with a name tag that says Dr. Something on it, then I will probably assume that that person has my best interests at heart and that the drugs he or she is giving me are going to help me (even though none of those things are necessarily true). If someone wearing a hoodie offers me drugs in an alleyway out of a baggie, I will likely assume that the drugs are ‘just for fun,’ and that the person is dangerous and not especially committed to my well-being (though none of those things might be true either). There are lots of shades of grey between these two extremes of licit and illicit, too — the friend of a friend who can get you weed, the naturopath who advertises in the back of a new age magazine, your auntie who’s just really good at helping pregnant women with their morning sickness, the not-quite-legal-but-never-really-busted dispensary, the friend who’s not taking Lyrica any more and gives you the rest of her scrip when you’re hard up.

“Assuming we’re talking about ‘real’ witches here (i.e., not just someone who’s accused of witchcraft by an inquisition, but a local wise woman or healer), I see the witch’s work as falling on a similar spectrum. She is clearly not offering the ‘official’ help that a physician or priest would, which brings with it a lot of risks, but which also allows someone to work outside a system that doesn’t necessarily offer her what she needs. I think the ‘witch’ in this sense is a crucial contribution to the social health of a culture, especially a culture that is under the heel of powerful institutions that do not take women or other marginalized groups seriously.”

And yet it’s hard not to notice that as much as the idea of the witch subverts traditional gender roles, it also, in some ways, upholds them. This is especially apparent in our modern take on the witch, especially when it comes to the Neopagan movement, a set of modern pagan religions of which Wicca is the most well-known. Many practices and beliefs in various sects of Neopaganism can be very rigid and cis-normative in their treatment of gender, and this, of course, has the unfortunate consequence of perpetuating gender stereotypes. As Tuzlak puts it:

“The image of the ‘witch’ can be both liberating and oppressive to women, very often at the same time. The history of modern witchcraft makes gendered language very hard to escape. Keep in mind that most of the primary branches of Neopagan practice were shaped by men, which means that Gardnerian/Alexandrian/Crowleyan constructions of masculinity and femininity arise out of very conservative views on gender, in line with the assumptions of 19th-century English esotericists and the medieval/early modern texts they were working with. As a result, a lot of introductory magic textbooks talk in a very uncritical way about the ‘masculine’ sun and the ‘feminine’ moon, ‘masculine’ fire and ‘feminine’ water, and so on. That said, Gardnerian and Alexandrian branches aren’t all there is, and there were smart, badass, complicated women like Helena Blavatsky, Dion Fortune, and Doreen Valienteinvolved even in the earliest stages of modern witchcraft, and in the past few decades there has been a move to make Neopaganism more intersectional and queer.”

It’s not hard to understand why witches and witchcraft continue to hold sway over women — especially young women on the cusp of adulthood who are faced with a world that refuses to take them seriously except as sexual objects. Not only has witchcraft historically offered women power that they might not otherwise be able to access, but witches offer girls and women an alternative role model to the ubiquitous young, beautiful Disney princess. A witch can be any age; a witch does not need to be conventionally attractive; a witch does not wait for a prince charming, nor does she rely on anyone but herself. Given that, the witch’s appeal is easy to appreciate. Tuzlak theorizes that young women’s attraction to witchcraft goes beyond even that and taps into our deep-seated need for ritual:

“Both boys and girls can be badly wounded by traditional Christian or Anglo-American gender roles, especially if they’re queer or trans or otherwise ill-fitting to those roles, and girls are going to suffer more acutely if the family is more reactionary in its politics. Magic is an unofficial shortcut to a feeling of spiritual power and belonging when legitimate methods have been closed off to you, and that happens to girls more often and more traumatically than boys in our culture. But I think that magic appeals to a lot of people who feel like they’re out of place in their local religious or social landscape. I don’t think Christian rituals (at least in many white/mainline/evangelical/Protestant churches — Christianity is very diverse and I do not like generalizing) serve young people very well, and I don’t think they serve young girls well in particular, which is another reason why young people find ways to fulfil their ritual needs elsewhere. There are so few formal, public rituals that recognize and affirm girls.”

It’s impossible to say where witchcraft will go from here or what “witchy” will look like a century or two from now. What seems certain is that as long as our society remains invested in hierarchical power structures that function by excluding certain groups of people, then those outsiders will continue to look for other things that fulfill their needs. And so long as the tradition of the witch exists, those who struggle to find legitimacy in traditional power structures will almost certainly be drawn to witchcraft — whatever that word or practice might mean to them. Because as much as we might try to define what a witch is or what she does, the truth is that the term is much broader than any one definition can contain. Or perhaps it is easier to simply say that a witch is someone who, when faced with a brick wall, learns to dig a tunnel. A witch is a survivor and witchcraft is a means of survival in a world that does not always value your life.

By Noah Berlatsky

If you had told fans of the Mad Max franchise circa-1986 that the fourth film in the series — up for an Academy Award at this Sunday’s Oscars ceremony — was going to be an explicitly feminist (or at least arguably feminist) narrative about overthrowing the patriarchy, said fans would probably have grunted and scratched their armpits in amused disbelief. Because whatever their virtues, the first three Mad Max films were, at best, only dimly interested in women.

Director George Miller’s series is devoted to manly men beating their manly chests while grunting and butting chests and cars and other manly bits. Tough guy, glowering-cowboy-biker-machismo and leather, and guns, and brutal death in gladiatorial combat: That’s what Mad Max was originally all about, not feminism.

The first film, in 1979, was particularly stark in its gleefully Neanderthal gender posturing. In a post-apocalypse that looked almost indistinguishable from the present, Mel Gibson as Max wanders through a right-wing nightmare in which evil thugs protected by oleaginous lawyers terrorize good neighborly folks and threaten the fabric of civil society. Max’s pure, sporadically spunky wife is casually offed to provide him with the requisite revenge motive. But the real energy of the film is in the male bonding, whether between Max and his shirtless, leather-pants-wearing police commander, or between the cops and their slavering biker gang antagonists. Men man the barricades of civilization to protect women from the barbaric manly hordes amidst the grim grinding of gear shifts, biceps, and gender stereotypes.

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) shuffle male archetypes a bit, but don’t really challenge them. With an increased budget, the post-apocalypse looks much more post-apocalyptic, and Max transforms from an agent of the crumbling but noble state into a wandering loner. He’s a shaggy cowboy Han Solo swaggering into Dodge to declare his contempt for the sissified city folk before offering to die for them in an apotheosis of revving engines and gunfire. Women and children look up to Max and his giant swinging guns, and he laconically acknowledges their tribute by performing uber-competence and uber-violence. Then he heads back out into the desert: a man alone with only his penis and his car for companionship.

There are, though, perhaps a few foreshadowings of Fury Road in the earlier films — especially in the character of Aunt Entity in Thunderdome. Entity, played by an electric if under-utilized Tina Turner, is the boss of Bartertown, a precarious community of thieves and toughs. She has shakily reinstated the order which Max brutally but unsuccessfully defended in the first film.

“You think I don’t know the law? Wasn’t it me who wrote it?” she declares. Though she’s the villain of the piece, her motives seem admirable, more or less. She wants to preserve civilization, and build a functional community out of pig shit — the fuel which Bartertown uses for power. Entity isn’t exactly a feminist hero, but she’s still a precursor of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, who overthrows the evil patriarch Immortan Joe in order to establish a better, female-led society.

In fact, when you look at Entity, the gap between the women in the earlier Mad Max films and Furiosa doesn’t seem so great after all. Perhaps Furiosa isn’t a rejection of the Mad Max series’ gender roles so much as a re-crystallization of them. From the first film to the last, women are figured as a force for civilization; as Aunty suggests, they are the ones on whom the law is built. In the first movie, Max is a policeman — but only as long as his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) is at home, tending to the baby and providing an oasis of 1950s idyllic home life to ground her man. Once she’s gone, Max turns from lawgiver into vigilante outsider, riding sweatily towards isolation and death.

The various communities into which Max drifts in the second and third films are also anchored by women and the associated children. Men are sometimes in charge — but all-male communities in these films tend to be gangs, not civilizations. Notably in Beyond Thunderdome, when Max stumbles into a group of kids reminiscent of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, the children aren’t all boys. Instead, the leader, and the person who preserves the oral traditions, is Savannah Nix (Helen Buday). At the conclusion of the film, Savannah has found an abandoned city and has figured out how to generate electricity, to light many of the buildings at night. They keep them on, she says, in case Max, or others, should return — a beacon of civilization for all those lost men, traipsing about the desert as men do.

Fury Road is in some ways a radical break with Mad Max past. It puts a woman at the center of the story, and that woman gets to overthrow the patriarchal law giver. It’s almost as if Jessie from the first movie kneed Max (rather than the bad guy biker) in the crotch and stole his car.

But was Furiosa really that revolutionary? One could argue that the last film in the franchise could also be seen as a conservative embrace of Mad Max gender roles past. Women are civilization; Immortan Joe’s male patriarchy, in which women are enslaved and marginalized, is therefore innately uncivilized — an unsustainable innovation. Furiosa, in going from Max-like rebel to domestic leader, isn’t launching a progressive future so much as she’s turning the clock back.

The apocalypse rewinds, and the matriarchal civilization is reinstated. And Mad Max for his part fights for the women as he always does, before striding off toward the wilderness, where men are uncivilized men alone.

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Lead image: flickr/Tom Blunt