Here Comes Lindy West, and She’s Holding a Broom

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/books/review/the-witches-are-coming-lindy-west.html

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THE WITCHES ARE COMING By Lindy West

The writer and feminist extraordinaire Lindy West has never been one to shy away from conflict. Whether it’s confronting online trolls or debating comedians about whether rape jokes belong in the “cultural conversation,” West has long managed to balance fearlessness with vulnerability — the kind that’s a relative of honesty, which is the best kind. And she’s prolific, with essays and articles appearing in The New York Times, The Stranger, Jezebel and The Guardian; plus her best-selling memoir, “Shrill,” and the Hulu series it inspired; and now, her essay collection, “The Witches Are Coming,” which is a manifesto for the post-Obama, pre-impeachment-investigation, #MeToo era.

At least, it’s a manifesto for some people.

The book begins with West’s description of her husband’s chance encounter with a guy she calls LarryBarry. At a dive bar in Chicago, LarryBarry shares the story of his own chance encounter on the dance floor, the gist of which is: The P.C. police are out to get us, so watch your back. West’s husband responds kindly and noncommittally, unwilling to join the gripefest about oversensitive women. West writes, “It seems that a lot of men are confusing being asked not to violate other people’s sexual boundaries with being forbidden to participate in basic human activities such as dancing, dating, chatting, walking around, going to work and telling jokes.”

West has some thoughts for LarryBarry — and Donald Trump, his cronies and basically all people who employ the catchphrase “witch hunt” when they feel attacked for their views and behavior. She argues not only that the term is misguided — historically, women were the targets of witch hunts, so why men are climbing on broomsticks is beyond her — but also that it “has the power to transform pretty much any credible accusation against a man into an unfair — nay, unconstitutional — and unfounded smear campaign.”

West then turns the phrase on its head, leading to the crux of her book: “So fine, if you insist. This is a witch hunt. We’re witches, and we’re hunting you.”

[ Read an excerpt from “The Witches Are Coming.” ]

The problem is, West’s “you” feels heavily focused on white, cisgender men while overlooking the fact that white women can be just as invested in white supremacy as their male counterparts. She draws a clear line between men and women when, in reality, both parties can be guilty of harmful perspectives regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

In “How to Be a Girl,” West uses the movie “Clue” as an entry point to discuss superficial representations of women in pop culture. She describes the four main women in the film, each one a “type” of some sort: “Yvette, the maid, who is a French sex goof; Mrs. White, who is a small and beautiful female separatist ice queen; Miss Scarlet, who is fricking glamorous as hell and a sexy madam. … Then there’s Mrs. Peacock, who is wearing an entire natural history museum and constantly screaming.”

From there, West moves on to explore other pop icons that have had a big impact on her: “Reality Bites,” where she learned that women are either a Winona Ryder or a Janeane Garofalo; “The Breakfast Club,” where she learned that “rage and degradation are the selling points of an alluring bad boy, not the red flags of an abuser.” As for “Friends”? West says, “I need a separate therapist just to deal with Fat Monica.”

O.K., fine. She’s pointing out that women can be pathologized for their intelligence and that fat women are a constant source for jokes. This may be true. But West never connects the dots to the bigger picture, where white women have been overrepresented in media since time immemorial while people of color — irrespective of size or intellect — are still fighting for visibility and freedom from menial, poverty-stricken or criminal roles (or all of the above). As Gabrielle Union wrote in a 2018 piece in Time: “I would love to see more films like ‘Juno’ or ‘Lady Bird,’ deliciously nuanced coming-of-age stories that women of color just don’t get to tell. It’s not that we don’t have the material — those books have been written, those articles have been published and those web series exist. But those projects don’t get funded.”

In “Always Meet Your Heroes,” West introduces us to Chip and Joanna Gaines, who rocketed to HGTV stardom with their five-season run of the home makeover show “Fixer Upper.” Apparently, fans were willing to overlook their membership at Waco’s Antioch Community Church, whose pastor, Jimmy Seibert, supports gay conversion therapy and disapproves of marriage equality. When BuzzFeed reported this news, the Gaineses released a statement: “We are not about to get in the nasty business of throwing stones — don’t ask us to because we won’t play that way.” They did not address the homophobia head-on, although West notes that “Fixer Upper” finally featured its first gay couple in Season 5. “There is no value in willfully ignoring hatred,” she writes, “and the lie that neutrality in the face of oppression is not a political stance is part of how we got here.”

True and true. But West herself willfully ignores the ways that prejudice against the L.G.B.T. community intersects with so many other kinds of oppression — or else, just as damning, she simply doesn’t see it. In a chapter trying to center the humanity of L.G.B.T. people, it seems odd that she skates over the death of Muhlaysia Booker, the 23-year-old black trans woman who was murdered in May in Dallas, just a 90-minute drive from Waco. West never acknowledges the epidemic of violence toward black trans women, and the single sentence about Booker feels perfunctory to the point of offensiveness.

In an abrupt but welcome shift, we turn to “Do Make Me Barf,” where West hilariously recounts a Goop summit at which she tried to adopt Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle. She spent $300 on three days’ worth of groceries; she almost “barfed up” soaked raw almonds (who wouldn’t?); and she accidentally incinerated her Paltrow-approved chicken dinner at the very moment she was about to expire from hunger. She describes the oxygen bar and the tent where you could have your aura photographed, plus tiny vegan doughnuts and ladles of bone broth. This is all fun stuff.

And yet. West notes the summit’s narrow spectrum of representation (“I did wonder if anyone at Goop had brought up the lack of diversity in their speakers during the planning stages”) but, once again, her concern feels perfunctory. She writes: “You can’t honestly address ‘wellness’ — the things people need to be well — without addressing poverty and systemic racism, disability access and affordable health care, paid family leave and food insecurity, contraception and abortion, sex work and the war against drugs and mass incarceration. Unless, of course, you are talking only about the wellness of people whose lives are untouched by all of those forces.” She’s right, and she hits some important notes on this laundry list — but then she leaves it all on the line, swaying in the breeze. Two pages later, West is rushing to her appointment with a shaman who’s running so late, it doesn’t make sense to hang around.

“The Witches Are Coming” picks up steam toward the end, when West writes about her roots in the Pacific Northwest, her decision to leave Twitter and her use of anger as a weapon. Here, her voice is clear and impassioned, her argument firm. (“Irreverence is the ultimate luxury item.” How true.) I wished for the same tightness in the first half of the book, where West is trying to layer in too many anecdotes and pop-cultural references when her own opinions would suffice. “The Witches Are Coming” is indeed a fiery book from an admirable author, but a witch hunt has to cover all the angles if it hopes to have a real and lasting impact.