The Witches Are Coming

Lindy West is definitely in my top 5 favorite writers. She may be my all time favorite. I never heard of her before reading Shrill last year. She is incredible. An articulate, sweary (spellcheck changed this to sweaty and she is that, too, according to this book), funny, incredibly smart, intersectional feminist.

I listened to this book on audio, read by Lindy, and it was perfection. I need to buy it so I can quote the shit out of it.

"So fine. This is a witch hunt. We are witches and we are hunting you." --Lindy West

I am not a fan of essay collections, but I always make an exception for Lindy West. It is as if she is inside my mind, knowing exactly how I am struggling in this era of Nazism and rampant racism. She gets the struggle and confirms that it is okay to feel such strong emotions. She also inspires, giving you the fuel to keep fighting the good fight. In this collection, she specifically uses the term witch hunt as a rallying cry, and I am here for it.

I agree with most of what Lindy West says in this book. I feel bad giving it two stars. But I’m gonna, because this is a book with Problems.

The first Problem is that West didn’t offer me any new insights or ideas. She didn’t challenge me in any way. What she did, over and over, was take a compelling hook -- she’s great at hooks -- and then pivot to Donald Trump. (Occasionally she pivoted to climate doom or something instead. Like. Three times?) Almost every essay leads back to Donald Trump. She can’t stop namechecking him. I’m sick of reading about him, but even more, I’m sick of journalists acting like they aren’t a huge part of the problem because they’re so obsessed with Trump they can’t shut up about him. show more (“But I’m raising awareness!” Yes, you are, and that’s exactly the problem. Shut. Up. Treat him like the disgusting nonentity he’d be without you credulous nitwits propping him up.) West acts like yelling (at her audience, who already agrees with her) “Donald Trump is a BAD MAN” is accomplishing anything. If it is, it’s actively causing harm.

And problem number two is that almost all of this book is actively causing harm, because it mostly consists of yelling at people to do things we already desperately want to do but cannot make happen. Defeat Trump! Save the planet! End structural inequality! Yes, great, got a plan? Some way I can chip in? Concrete actions? No. It’s just the yelling. I’ll be honest: if I want someone all-capsing at me about how doomed we are, I can get that anywhere online. I don't need to check out a book for that.

The third problem is a failure of research, I guess? And I’m going to explain this with an example where I give way too much detail, but it's such a perfect example of how West fails to come to grips with the complexity of the problems she identifies. In an essay, West discusses how her husband’s Seattle [Music] Gear Swap Facebook community managed to get rid of their dozen or so racists, and then she says:

“Twitter could do this. Facebook could do this. ...All of them are desperate to keep you away from the truth: that they could make their platforms safe, constructive, and non-Nazi-infested for all users, but they choose not to.”

To which I say: Lindy, if you know where the “Get Rid Of All The Awful People (But Only The Awful People)” button is, you are about to make MILLIONS. Because all the major platforms have been frantically looking for it since they started, and they haven’t even figured out what planet it’s on yet.

“But the Gear Swap!” Imaginary Lindy West responds in my head. Yes, Imaginary Lindy. The Gear Swap moderators did great. But they probably have a few tens of thousands people in their group, and their methods -- basically monitoring everything, telling jerks to cut it out, and banning them -- do not scale. Facebook as a whole has THREE BILLION users. They speak many, many languages. And they’re humans; they engage in more different kinds of bad behavior than any one of us can possibly imagine.

“But if you just hired enough people --” Okay, so you need 300,000 people to scale up this solution, just by ratio alone. (For comparison, Facebook, as far as I can tell, currently has around 15,000 contractor moderators and around 70,000 full time employees in every section of the business.) Except you’re going to need way more than that. Add, say, another 50,000 second-line decision makers for all the edge cases. (There will be SO many.) Add in 35,000 managers. That's 385,000 *new* employees.

Then consider turnover. The Gear Swap members are not, I’m guessing, posting the kind of stuff that is actively traumatizing to see (like child sexual assault or graphic violence). So the Gear Swap mods are not being harmed by the work they’re doing, and they can keep on. Your 385,000 people (more than the population of Cleveland) are going to be harmed. They’re going to burn out. They’ll have a huge turnover rate. You’re going to need a new Cleveland’s worth of people *every two years.* And you need to somehow train all these people (probably thousands of new hires EVERY WEEK) to recognize every subtle, coded way people communicate their horrible thoughts and deeds. In every language on earth. For every different mode of communication in every one of those languages, all of which are constantly evolving. Lindy, if you can make this happen, you’re the hero we need, so get going.

Do I expect West to understand how the internet works? I do not. But I do expect her to be able to ask someone who does, to do some research, to think things through. If she can’t do any of that, why is she writing essays?

And she demonstrably can’t do any of that. She makes so many sweeping statements, and a little research would tell her they’re wrong. So, like, she says Lil Bub was the first viral internet cat, but that is not the case. Lil Bub was just the first one West noticed; two minutes on Wikipedia would have told her she wasn't the first. Much worse, in her essay about Joan Rivers, she says when Rivers was coming up, there were only two ways to be a female comedian: bend or break. (Become a misogynistic nightmare or stop being a comedian, basically.) Lindy, you might want to research some comedy history before you make that statement. (Or any other statement about comedy. She also said “The Simpsons are the original high bar of comedy.” About a television show that started in 1989. People writing about comedy have GOT to stop assuming comedy started when they started paying attention to it.)

Oh, one final note: West uses “dicklicker” as an insult in this book. Really? Is there a way to read that that isn’t homophobic? Because I’m not seeing it.

Basically, there’s no point to this book that I can see. Like, I definitely read this at the wrong time -- hoo boy does this all look incredibly naïve now. But there was never a right time for me to read this, because there's almost no content in here worth my time. (I’m still giving it two stars, not one, though, because she did make me laugh once, and a genuine laugh always gets an extra star.) show less

I adored, adored, adored Lindy West’s best-selling Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, filled with essays that were both humorously clever and sharply articulated. The Witches Are Coming — which I preordered on Audible, naturally — proves just as spectacular.

From the introduction, “They Let You Do It,” the book has one amazing essay after another on “the oldest and most sacred of male bonding exercises: objectifying women”; on cat memes, on Goop’s laser-like focus on the richest 5 percent, on the nihilism and selfishness of South Park’s Trey Stone and Matt Parker, abortion, the deference shown to handsome serial killers over their victims, the cesspool that is Twitter and lots more.

My favorite quote in a book filled with show more excellent quotes is this one of misbehaving men who recast themselves as the true victims: “I think we can all agree that this fully checks out and that, indeed, it is men who are the true victims of witch hunts. Which they invented. To kill women.”

Sometimes, to debunk an incredibly stupid argument, all you have to do is say it out loud. Thank you, Lindy West, for remaining a loud woman! And thanks for narrating it, as well. show less

Best for:
People who want essays that critically explore politics and pop culture while making you laugh your ass off.

In a nutshell:
Author Lindy West follows up her Bestseller (and TV show!) Shrill with this book of essays exploring the Trump era, the Me Too movement, and many other aspects of political and pop culture.

Worth quoting:
“We need to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.”
“Watching otherwise rational human beings rhapsodize about [Ted] Bundy’s ‘charm’ and ‘brilliance’ while furrowing their brows over Elizabeth Warren’s dubious ‘likability’ creates a particularly American kind of whiplash.”
“Both show more sides, inasmuch as there are two ‘sides,’ are not equally stupid or equally bad. The notion that they are is human-extinction-level dangerous.”
“…if you are a person who is unable to access abortion for any reason, your state is total disenfranchisement and your right to life has been stripped from you.”

Why I chose it:
West is a fantastic author.

Review:
There’s something wonderful (dare I say magical?) about the way Lindy West writes. She can cut to the chase quickly while also providing hilarious analogies and examples to illustrate her points. She shares parts of herself that she doesn’t owe to anyone as a way to personalize stories. She takes a critical eye to things that maybe one has been thinking about and nails down the exact components one should be taking away from them. And she writes like a person might actually talk! Her asides are hilarious, and I can definitely picture her saying many parts of these essays in conversation with her friends.

The first essay of the book is the inspiration for the title - the US president’s insistence that he is the subject of a witch hunt. West explains why that is absurd, but turns the concept around, claiming that we are witches, and we are the ones doing the hunting. Hunting down horrible, dangerous political leaders, manipulative and rapey Hollywood figures, the patriarchy.

I love it.

The essays range in topic from her love of the movie Clue, to a critical exploration of Adam Sandler’s films and what they say about what white men aspire to / get away with, abortion access, the ridiculousness of South Park’s ‘both sides are equally bad’ rhetoric, and so much more.

She even went to one of GOOP’s events!

I think my favorite is the one where she explains why she left Twitter. It sums up so much of what is deeply wrong with that social media platform (among others) while also acknowledging the ways it can be so important to different groups. I also enjoyed her takes on other pop culture folks I grew up exposed to, such as Adam Corolla and Joan Rivers - they were genuinely different and interesting to read.

I did not know this was coming out - I saw it mentioned in passing somewhere and immediately purchased it. There were only four copies available on Amazon UK, so I’m thinking maybe it doesn’t have a distributor here yet? Anyways, if you’re overseas, keep checking, and maybe ask your indie booksellers if they’re planning / able to carry it.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
As with Shrill, which made the trip across the ocean when I moved here from Seattle, I will Keep it. And also buy copies for friends. Maybe give it as Christmas gifts. show less

I haven’t watched the tv show Shrill but I remember reading a little of the book, but I never finished it because it was a time when I used to abandon books midway a lot. But I also remember that I found it very interesting and powerful. So when I saw this book on my Libro.fm list for November, I knew I had to pick it up immediately and I’m so glad I didn’t put it off.

As I always like to do, I listened and read this book simultaneously and while it’s a very wonderful book to read, the author’s narration makes it excellent. She is fiery and passionate and brings out all the emotions that she may have felt while writing the book into her narrative voice, and it makes for a very immersive listening experience. Right alongside show more her, I felt angry and disappointed, I laughed out and I felt motivated. Any book that evokes such strong feelings in us deserves a read.

This book is also extremely quotable. I just kept highlighting paragraphs upon paragraphs in my kindle, and I think I could have done that to the whole book. The book is not a single coherent story, it’s more like a collection of essays with each chapter dealing with a different topic that the author deeply resonates with. She is a pro-choice, body positive, feminist writer and is completely unapologetic about her opinions and I admire her so much for it. I particularly loved reading her thoughts on the #MeToo movement, abortion rights, youth activism and women’s anger.

But what makes this book special is her no holds barred style of writing. That would probably be considered a good attitude for a man but not a woman, and the author talks extensively about all the ways in which this hypocrisy persists - where men are assumed to be the leaders and risk takers and capable, whereas women have to work doubly hard to prove themselves to be on par while also fighting off impossible expectations of niceness and likability. And whatever topic she is talking about, it’s inevitable that the discussion turns to the current president and she is fearless in her criticism of his policies, as well as the overall destructive platform of the Republicans and their right wing cohorts. And she is also highly critical of the “center” or “apolitical” people as if choosing not to be political in the current climate is in itself not a highly privileged political stance.

I could probably write a lot more in my review, but I want to end it right here and ask you to pick this up. Read it, listen to it, it’s your choice but do consume it. It may not talk about things we don’t already know, but sometimes it’s good to get a reminder - especially from someone who hits the nail on the head so articulately and without holding herself back. And as a fat woman, I admire the author even more for sticking up for her principles in the face of unimaginable trolling and threats. It’s an extremely well written and narrated book and I highly recommend it. show less

Started out really strong and faded away slightly towards the end. Even as a lifelong liberal, I found new ways of looking at our society and culture through West's words. I've now inhaled all three of her books in less than a week, so I think you can say that she has a new fangirl.