Witches, Sluts, Feminists

After a decade of exploring gender in contemporary music, art, and culture as a journalist, I started a sex-positive feminist website called Slutist.

You have hundreds of years of art history where men, at least on record, were the ones creating images of witches,” Grossman says. “Sometimes they were really sexy, young temptresses that would lead to your downfall, and sometimes they were hags who literally boiled babies and cast hexes on you.”

The Enemy Within that the witch hunt as metaphor is “a mode (most often) of moral reproach.” You’ll find the label readily affixed when there appears to be “some allegation of subversive intent, of conspiratorial menace, of concealed betrayal.”

Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975

Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist

Women—and other oppressed groups—sometimes try to outdo their oppressors in scorning persons perceived as outsiders, in hope of being accepted, or tolerated, themselves,”

The core difference in connotation between “slut” and “player” exposes the sexual double standard, where men are rewarded for their sexual activity, while women are punished for theirs.

other words, the sexist system is rigged against us all—although women and those on the feminine spectrum have suffered disproportionately because of it.

a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” hooks intentionally does not name men as the root cause of this oppression, but rather gender stereotypes and sexist narratives—which can be propagated by a person of any gender.

The witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression. She is all and she is one. The witch has as many moods and as many faces as the moon.

Most of all, she is misunderstood.