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[ 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.”
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