Witch Bitch

By and with hashtagmonike

Women who have no desire for church, kitchen, and children are by no means magical creatures. Yet the idea of defiant female beings who, in a distant past, danced on mountaintops at full moon, devoured children, and burned at the stake still provides material for all kinds of horror stories today: figures of witches run through fairy tales, TV series, theater productions, and amusement parks.

But what are we actually talking about when we talk about witches? In the early modern period, “witch” primarily meant that you could have your neighbor dragged into the torture chamber and onto the pyre because she did not want to marry you. The claim that women possessed magical powers meant, on the one hand, that there was a scapegoat for everything one could not or did not want to explain. On the other hand, it meant that fantasies of violence had found a body on which they could be systematically exercised. Margaret Atwood once said: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” And the ever-renewed attempts by men to secure their power might indeed be laughable—if they were not so deadly for women.

In Witch Bitch, hashtagmonike discover their delight in conjuration dances, satanic rituals, and the supernatural, repeatedly stumbling over clichés of femininity that are sometimes a thousand years old, sometimes only a few weeks old. Because there are no witches, bitches. Or are there?