The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sex Trouble: Yes, Feminists DO ‘Practice Witchcraft … and Become Lesbians’

Posted on | February 26, 2015 | 161 Comments

“[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
— Pat Robertson, 1992

Today the first edition of my book Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature is available for purchase from Amazon — just in time for CPAC — and by happy coincidence, another journalist has recently confirmed what I have been telling you guys for months: Every single word of that quote is true.

All any researcher has to do is to Google “Dianic Wicca” or “Goddess Movement” to learn all they need to know about this, but I went beyond that; I’ve already read five books about neopagan witchcraft and especially about the feminist witch cult known as “Reclaiming.”

The link between feminism, lesbianism and — yes, believe it or not — witchcraft is familiar territory for those who have been reading the “Sex Trouble” series here for the past seven months, but it was news to Guardian columnist Sady Doyle:

Season of the witch: why young women
are flocking to the ancient craft
Rapper Azealia Banks brought witchcraft back into the mainstream by tweeting ‘I’m really a witch’. But women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a ‘spiritual but not religious’ way to express feminist ambitions

. . .Witchcraft — and the embrace of “magical” practices, like reading tarot cards — has recently experienced a resurgence of sorts among young, creative, politically engaged women.
This is largely reflected in niche corners of US pop culture: 2013’s American Horror Story: Coven, in which witchcraft stood in for girl power, was the most popular American Horror Story season ever. A popular Tumblr blog, Charmcore, purports to be run by three witch sisters; it gives sarcastic “magical” advice and praise of the female celebrities it deems to be “obvious witches”. On the more serious side, teen sensation Rookie magazine has published tarot tutorials along with more standard-issue feminist and fashion advice, and Autostraddle, a popular left-leaning blog for young queer women, has an in-house tarot columnist. Speaking of which, those tarot cards are available in trendy Brooklyn knickknack shops and Urban Outfitters, as well as new age stores. And these days, no one thinks there’s anything weird about herbal medicine and other potions. . . .
“To reclaim the word witch is to reclaim our right, as women, to be powerful,” wrote Starhawk, in her seminal 1979 book The Spiral Dance. “To be a witch is to identify with 9 million victims of bigotry and hatred and to take responsibility for shaping a world in which prejudice claims no more victims.”
Today, The Spiral Dance is in its third edition, and has sold over 300,000 copies. It is many people’s first introduction to Wicca, the earth-based spiritual movement that was created in the 1950s and has come to be a recognized religion around the world. It is also one of the most well known and comprehensive texts from a very particular moment in feminist history which until recently was largely unfashionable: the “women’s spirituality” movement, in which women radically rewrote existing religions, or simply made their own to be in line with the goals of women’s liberation.

Doyle quotes Autostraddle’s lesbian tarot columnist talking about “women who were persecuted in the past — wise women, witches, women who practiced that kind of ‘kitchen table’ healing that wasn’t part of the patriarchal progression of medicine.” This feminist myth of medieval witches as pagan proto-feminists persecuted by religious patriarchy was promoted in the 1970s by radical lesbians Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. As I explain in Sex Trouble, “These claims have since been debunked by legitimate historians, including the British professor Ronald Hutton, whose 1999 book The Triumph of the Moon is arguably the definitive history of modern witchcraft.”

Let me make two points about my methods as a journalist:

  1. I never underestimate the intelligence of my readers. It is a common mistake of journalists to think they are endowed with special wisdom, so that they must explain everything to readers who are presumed to be too stupid to figure things out on their own. Such an arrogant attitude insults the reader. Besides, who wants a readership of dimwit ignoramuses? Daily Kos?
  2. In the Internet age, every reader is their own fact-checker. You can use Google the same as me. If I were to start just making stuff up like a Rolling Stone reporter, my readers would bust me in a heartbeat. There’s no point trying to deceive or mislead readers. Even if I wanted to lie to you, I couldn’t get away with it. My job is to find the truth and write the truth, and if it weren’t for the relationship of trust that has been developed with regular readers here in the past seven years, I wouldn’t be doing this.

Nobody has a monopoly on the facts, so I encourage readers to do their own research. So many of the stories I tell here begin with somebody in the comments throwing in a link, or a Twitter follower tipping me off to a story. And this whole crazy radical feminist trip really began when one of my friendly readers called my attention to this crazy sentence:

“No woman is heterosexual.”

As I explain in the concluding chapter of Sex Trouble:

That four-word sentence sent me off on an investigation of her sources, especially including Professor Dee Graham, whose 1994 book Loving to Survive theorized female heterosexuality as a response to male-inflicted “sexual terror,” akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome. Understanding this claim in turn required me to examine the sources cited in Graham’s bibliography, including lesbian feminists like Marilyn Frye, Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde and Charlotte Bunch. Graham even managed to work in a citation to “Starhawk” (neé Miriam Simos), the lesbian feminist who was the founding high priestess of a California-based pagan witchcraft cult known as Reclaiming. From such dubious sources Graham had propounded her theory of sexuality, based in a view of men as violent oppressors and women as victims suffering under tyrannical male supremacy.

Still more, from the same concluding chapter:

In 1980, Australian feminist Denise Thompson described how “countless numbers of lesbians” joined the feminist movement because it offered them “the possibility of a cultural community of women whose primary commitment was to other women rather than to men.” Furthermore, Thompson added, the rise of the feminist movement produced a “mass exodus of feminist women from the confining structures of heterosexuality” in such numbers as to raise questions about “the institution of heterosexuality in the consciousness of those feminists who, for whatever reason, chose not to change their sexual orientation.” And why shouldn’t this have been the expected result?
Women “changed their sexual/social orientation from men to women,” Thompson explained, “in response to the feminist political critique of their personal situations of social subordination.” If the personal is political (as feminists say) and if women’s relationships with men are “confining structures” of “social subordination,” why would any feminist be heterosexual?

You can buy Sex Trouble now at Amazon and read the whole thing, which brings the whole thing full circle back around to Starhawk, Dianic Wicca and the “Goddess Movement.” All of this may seem like kooky fringe stuff to some readers, but you’re not stupid. Do you really think an experienced political reporter would have spent so many months on this subject just for the fun of it? Oh, sure, it’s a lot of fun to point and laugh at these kooks and weirdos, but perhaps you’ve forgotten how this began with “The Long Shadow of the Lavender Menace.” Perhaps you didn’t recognize the significance of all those names of radical lesbians who joined the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1970s. I did.

This story isn’t going to go away, my friends. Republican strategists never had a motive to go that deep in their opposition research files in 2008, because Obama destroyed Hillary in the Democrat primaries. Yet the smart money now says Hillary is a near-certainty for the 2016 nomination; she seems to have no serious Democrat opponent. The connections between Hillary Clinton and Charlotte Bunch (who has never recanted her 1972 lesbian manifesto) and the 1995 Beijing women’s conference? Yeah, that subject is likely to become very interesting to a lot of people if and when Hillary gets the Democrat presidential nomination. Trust me on this. The prophetic omens are clear.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . . For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature . . .”
— Romans 1:22, 26 (KJV)

This special 120-page first edition of Sex Trouble is, of course, really a preview of the larger work that I now expect to finish by this fall. My original plan was to have the whole thing wrapped up months ago, but then I got swept up in the whirlpool of this radical madness and realized there was so much to synthesize and explain that there was no way I could do it in a hurry. Rather than force readers to wait another six months, however, I decided to put together this first edition for the loyal readers who have done so much already support this project.

Keep me in your prayers as I continue toiling away at this. Please buy my book, help promote it to others and don’t forget the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

Category: CPAC, Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

161 Responses to “Sex Trouble: Yes, Feminists DO ‘Practice Witchcraft … and Become Lesbians’”

  1. Rob Crawford
    February 27th, 2015 @ 3:31 pm

    “Late”. Uh-huh.

  2. The original Mr. X
    February 27th, 2015 @ 4:21 pm

    “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not so sure about the universe.” — Albert Einstein.

  3. M. Thompson
    February 27th, 2015 @ 4:25 pm

    He’s been dead for quite a while.

  4. Joe Guelph
    February 27th, 2015 @ 4:29 pm

    Actually, “Wicca” as we know it was cooked up in the early 1950s by a horny old British goat named Gerald Gardner (with possible assistance from Aleister Crowley) as an ingenious way to get young, credulous women out of their clothes. Gardner was a Freemason, and he shamelessly ripped off Brotherhood rituals for the supposedly “ancient” rites of Wicca.

  5. Jeanette Victoria
    February 27th, 2015 @ 4:34 pm

    That is correct Gerald Gardner was a member of the OTO (just like L. Ron Hubbard). However the explosion of popular Wicca really has to do more with movies and TV.

    I’m still good friends with Ed Fitch and he and few others are largely responsible for bringing pop Wicca to the states.

  6. Joe Guelph
    February 27th, 2015 @ 4:38 pm

    The OTO was the Velvet Underground of occultism: not many people got into it, but everyone who did seemed to have gone out and formed their own group.

  7. IceBerg77
    February 27th, 2015 @ 4:49 pm

    I’ve seen that stuff work before and I would not call it coincidence. If you believe in God, which is the supernatural, than the occult is just another form of it. For some people, myself included Judeo/Christianity offers nothing but that doesn’t mean spiritual beliefs need to be abandoned either.

  8. McCain Dumb@$$ Calls Scott Walker a Dumb@$$ | Regular Right Guy
    February 27th, 2015 @ 4:50 pm

    […] Sex Trouble: Yes, Feminists DO ‘Practice Witchcraft … and Become Lesbians’ […]

  9. Grandson Of TheGrumpus
    February 27th, 2015 @ 5:21 pm

    At rehab, reading blog while using whirlpool….
    Read your “Why Bother” blurb and started laughing—
    Dropped #@$&%*#@*!!! tablet!
    (luckily it didn’t quite get dunked! Whew!)

    Seems the Ellipsis 7 can live through a quick splash of hot water!
    ;~D}

  10. NeoWayland
    February 27th, 2015 @ 5:54 pm

    She’s sympathetic, but she has said several times she is not Wiccan.

  11. kilo6
    February 27th, 2015 @ 6:43 pm

    smash_patriarchy’); DROP TABLE feminism;
    /SQL humor

  12. K-Bob
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:08 pm

    This is gonna make heads explode like Rudy Giuliani being granted the power to invade people’s dreams.

    I quote myself, from a comment at Scoop’s where I let folks know about Stacy’s new book. I’m actually quite easy for me to interview. I didn’t give myself any difficult questions, and I gave myself plenty of time to answer.

    Sadly, that quote was all I found useable from the three hours I spent grilling myself at a wooden table on a darkened stage with a spotlight, al la Charlie Rose.

  13. K-Bob
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:12 pm

    Sanitize, sanitize, sanitize

  14. K-Bob
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:15 pm

    I’m pretty sure we did the stumbling around in front of many a campfire way back in the mis-spent youth days. Lots of howling and terrible singing were involved.

    I’ll leave the naked part up to the more adventurous sort.

  15. K-Bob
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:19 pm

    That’s only for tax purposes.

  16. M. Thompson
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:35 pm

    He’s not a rockstar.

  17. M. Thompson
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:37 pm

    Aren’t we all around here?

  18. Fail Burton
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:47 pm

    X-men Comics used to have The Banshee. He’d scream until everyone became so irritated they ceded the field of battle, just like at Agincourt.

  19. Fail Burton
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:48 pm

    If you look at the moon you can see her face quite clearly. She’s laughing at us.

  20. kilo6
    February 27th, 2015 @ 7:49 pm

    http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/exploits_of_a_mom.png

  21. Zohydro
    February 27th, 2015 @ 10:37 pm

    I discover that you are a moderator at The Right Scoop! I’ll have to add that as a Faculty Blog in my bookmarks…

  22. Daniel Freeman
    February 27th, 2015 @ 10:46 pm

    I will never forget the episode where Alyssa’s character Phoebe became a mermaid. It’s etched in my memory for some reason, I don’t know why. It’s a mystery.

    http://i155.photobucket.com/albums/s298/Scientivore/Women/alyssa_milano_mermaid_468x336_zpsutkqspyq.gif

  23. Nan
    February 27th, 2015 @ 11:49 pm

    Egg. She laid the egg.

  24. Nan
    February 28th, 2015 @ 12:07 am

    Witchcraft and medicine aren’t mutually exclusive. I think a lot of it is sincere theatrics but I’ve worked with wiccans, druids, etc. and some are very kind people.

  25. Bob Belvedere
    February 28th, 2015 @ 12:23 am

    Ordered the book as soon as I found out.

    Congratulations, Breeze.

    I have no doubt I’m in for a Helluva ride.

  26. Daniel Freeman
    February 28th, 2015 @ 1:20 am

    So what did you write or draw on the blank slate of her mind?

  27. K-Bob
    February 28th, 2015 @ 4:57 am

    I like that. Faculty Blog. We have a good bunch of folks hanging out there.

  28. JadedByPolitics
    February 28th, 2015 @ 7:11 am

    Book ordered! cannot wait for the larger book.

  29. Zohydro
    February 28th, 2015 @ 8:44 am

    Until a year and a half ago or so, I’d never read an actual blog (unless one counts Drudge and Breitbart as blogs!)

    I’d long thought “blogs” were only the screed of sad/psychotic people, on drugs, writing about cats, badly—and I avoided them! Only incidentally did I discover this blog…

    TOM was my first, but you and your fellow bloggers-in-arms here, those I would call reverentially “The Faculty”, have opened up a whole new world for me! I read far more blogs now than mainstream news these days…

  30. M. Thompson
    February 28th, 2015 @ 9:10 am

    The Penguins attack!

  31. NeoWayland
    February 28th, 2015 @ 9:44 am

    “We have to laugh at ourselves. No one else would take us seriously enough.”

  32. Michael Spangler
    February 28th, 2015 @ 10:31 am

    A duck!

  33. Michael Spangler
    February 28th, 2015 @ 10:33 am

    As soon as my tablet is charged I’m going to buy the book. It’s cold and snowy outside – I suspect witchcraft – so I might as well read a book.

  34. If All You See… » Pirate's Cove
    February 28th, 2015 @ 1:00 pm

    […] blog of the day is The Other McCain, with a post on feminists and […]

  35. Spang Nation
    February 28th, 2015 @ 1:19 pm

    […] all started when the pagan lesbian feminist website, Jezebel, posted a hit piece on Scott Walker accusing him of trying to stop […]

  36. Dana
    February 28th, 2015 @ 7:32 pm

    An excellent reason to remember Phoebe, but real mermaids don’t wear bras.

    http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/01/19/article-2542233-1ACE5D0F00000578-606_634x286.jpg

  37. K-Bob
    February 28th, 2015 @ 7:38 pm

    Man, I really have to think about which blog was my first regular read. Technically, Jerry Pournelle is the true “blogfather”, in that he had his daybook online years before anyone came up with the term “blog.”

    (I like ‘fess Reynolds a lot, but a lot of folks who were new to the Internet in the late nineties credit him with things he didn’t start.)

    I was a regular reader of his, and then later Ace of Spades, Townhall and Powerline. I gave Powerline the permanent boot when they tilted RINO/squish in 2007. Townhall got to be a zoo pretty fast, so I rarely visit there.

    Michelle Malkin was one of the best blogs back then. When she created Hot Air it was really cool. After she sold it, it became a joke.

    Stacy’s blog has been damned consistent from day one. It’s one of the reasons a lot of us appreciate hanging out here.

  38. K-Bob
    February 28th, 2015 @ 7:40 pm

    This requires more research.

  39. K-Bob
    February 28th, 2015 @ 7:48 pm

    Magic eight ball, probably.

  40. JadedByPolitics
    February 28th, 2015 @ 8:02 pm

    “I’d long thought “blogs” were only the screed of sad/psychotic people, on drugs, writing about cats, badly—and I avoided them!”

    Who told you about me? name them, I want to thank them for the awesome review LOL!

  41. Daniel Freeman
    March 1st, 2015 @ 1:12 am

    Netflix has it on instant watch. I just checked, which led to my discovery that my last re-watch of the show ended halfway through the episode after that one.

    I, uh, may have to re-start my next re-watch at the beginning of season five. For investigative reasons.

  42. Steve Skubinna
    March 1st, 2015 @ 6:53 am

    No, not witchcraft. What you have outside there is perfectly scientific Global Warming.

  43. Michael Spangler
    March 1st, 2015 @ 7:02 am

    Oh! You mean sorcery. A most apt observation. I don’t know why I didn’t see it myself. After all, I’ve seen the Harry Potter series.

  44. Quartermaster
    March 1st, 2015 @ 8:07 am

    Similar roots here. I read Pournelle’s Byte Column for years, and started with his day book back in the late 90s when I finally got online.

    I agree on Hot Air. It seems anything Salem touches becomes a joke. Red State is OK, but a couple of the mods are really thin skinned and Erickson thinks his comment threads are terrible.

  45. Quartermaster
    March 1st, 2015 @ 8:09 am

    There’s a big difference between the occult stuff and what God does however. God doesn’t do things on demand. Demons will do your will to the point they own you, and eventually take up residence in you. What happens after that doesn’t bear thought.

  46. Quartermaster
    March 1st, 2015 @ 8:20 am

    The knob on the left is volume. The knob on the right is focus. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen that model, so I may be misremembering.

  47. Quartermaster
    March 1st, 2015 @ 8:27 am

    I’m sure he still votes.

  48. K-Bob
    March 1st, 2015 @ 1:28 pm

    LOL!

    (IHTLOL)

  49. K-Bob
    March 1st, 2015 @ 1:30 pm

    Agree totally. I’d think they’d do better to dump the actual trolls regularly, let the regulars have some room to tussle a bit, and never write articles bashing the readers. That’s a rookie mistake by Erickson. (I remember when he did that.)

  50. Daniel Freeman
    March 1st, 2015 @ 1:35 pm

    We’ve been over this. If you hate to type LOL, then don’t do that. 😉