"The Hammer of Witches" (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism

Good morning readers, old and new. Can you believe it’s Halloween? Or that the US election is next week? I’m not sure I can bear to look.

P.s. For the latest edition of Prospect magazine, where I work, I reviewed two books that beg the question: can we ever move past the vicious fight over sex-based rights in British feminism?

P.p.s If you have a UK university email address (ending in ac.uk) we have an offer on for a one-year digital subscription for only £1. Tell your friends in academia!

And now for the reads….

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1) Spooky goings-on in the US

The Know Your Enemy podcast has an episode themed on gender and family in the 2024 US election campaign. Masculinity, they note, has been an issue this year in a way it wasn’t in 2020—or even in 2016 when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton. In the Observer, Simon Tisdall makes a similar point:

Unlike Hillary Clinton, the misogynists’ favourite 2016 target, Harris has downplayed the potentially historic nature of her candidacy. But derogatory, demeaning sexism remains a factor.

…

Rather than challenge Harris openly on gender, Trump digs and jibes indirectly, persistently talking about the need for “strength” in leading the country and bashing America’s enemies. “Strength” is his code for “male” or “manly”. His running mate, JD Vance, has cut out the “childless cat lady” talk – but his foul sexism lives on behind glib words. Viewed this way, the election could be said to boil down to a contest between Trump’s “strength” and Harris’s “joy”, her successful campaign motif. It’s Mars against Venus. Or, in its simplest form, man versus woman.

Polls reflect this age-old dichotomy. Men are more likely to back Trump; women lean towards Harris. A recent New York Times-Siena poll put her 16 points ahead of Trump among female voters. NBC gave her a 14-point lead with women. Trump leads by up to 16 points among men.

Kamala Harris tapped into her popularity among women, and indeed young women, in this “gender gap election” when she went on the Call her Daddy podcast this month. Call me a sucker, but I was incredibly moved to hear Harris on the show, which normally does sex advice and female empowerment. The Democrat nominee came across so well—like a real person!—but I am including this here because of how Harris and the host, Alex Cooper, discussed abortion. It’s quite something to hear two women in America put so clearly what is at stake. By the way, did you see that last month a judge in Georgia, in striking down a particularly harsh abortion ban, cited The Handsmaid’s Tale?

P.s. After the scary rally at Madison Square Garden this week, Nikki Haley, a Republican, said that the Trump campaign’s “bromance” and “masculinity stuff” is “going to make women uncomfortable.”

2) The problem with how MeToo scandals are reported

I may have a new favourite podcast—Carys Afoko and Gary Younge’s Over the Top and Under the Radar, in which they discuss over-reported and under-reported stories. In a recent episode, Afoko picked the Diddy rape and sex assault allegations as her “over the top”. Such stories are usually covered with attention to salacious detail, while perpetrators are singled out as monstrous predators, Afoko notes. It’s not that these are not monstrous crimes, but the perpetrators in these cases almost never act alone. Many people around them actively facilitate their crimes. In Diddy’s case, for instance, someone must have been booking hotel rooms and flights, etc, in order for the alleged trafficking and abuse to take place. Coverage also overlooks how a toxic work environment might enable abuse, says Afoko, or how the minor misogynies that women live with create a world where such crimes can occur.

Relatedly,

Jill Filipovic

has written for The Daily Beast about the recent stories (such as that of Diddy and Gisèle Pelicot in France), that involve allegations of men drugging and raping incapacitated victims. Filipovic makes the point that, as another story involving allegations against the CEO of clothing company Abercrombie and Fitch reminds us, men and boys are often victims of such abuse by men, too.

3) In Gaza, women are still giving birth in a living nightmare

It is unthinkable that the assault on Palestinians in Gaza continues. All this time, amid constant bombardment, starvation, disease outbreaks and mass displacement, women have been pregnant, miscarrying (at higher than normal rates, for obvious reasons), labouring and trying to keep their babies alive. With so many hospitals and health facilities targeted in this war, throughout the past 12 months pregnant women have been giving birth in horrendous conditions. There is little hope for a ceasefire any time soon, so things will only get worse. This month, Haaretz interviewed women in Gaza who have gone through this. Here is a snippet:

For Reham, unhygienic conditions at the hospital compounded the already horrendous circumstances. "A woman would give birth, and then you'd have to lie on that same bed, with her blood and sweat still on it," she recalls. "There were no pads or any way to clean up after giving birth." Basic hygiene was "nonexistent."

But the most difficult part was the isolation. "I had my baby on my own," she says. "My mother was still in Gaza City, my mother-in-law wasn't allowed to stay in the hospital due to the heavy bombardment," and her husband was also not present. "I was there completely alone."

4) Hope and resilience in Afghanistan

The ever-excellent The Persistent has a piece by Ruchi Kumar about how women in Afghanistan are resisting what is increasingly referred to as gender apartheid—despite the huge risks incurred in opposing the Taliban in any way. Kumar writes:

In the early days after the Taliban retook power, Afghan women and men regularly took to the streets of Kabul and other major cities to demand their rights. But as the Taliban tightened its grip on the country, brutally punishing any form of dissent and criticism, the protestors gradually thinned. Many, who were able, fled the country to avoid persecution, and others were forced into hiding. But small pockets of resistance, largely women, persisted…. In response to the deeper crackdowns, Afghan women figured out new ways to engage in nonviolent methods to express their demands.

In August, when the Taliban released its new edict banning women’s voices in public, hundreds of Afghan women recorded themselves singing and reciting poetry, and posted the videos to social media. Many wore face masks and veils to protect their identity.

She also explores the leading role of women in non-violent movements:

Research, including that of the Harvard scholar, Erica Chenoweth, back the claim that women’s capacity to remain nonviolent makes women’s movements more impactful. Studies show that nonviolent movements with frontline participation of women are more likely to achieve their goals and less likely to turn to violence and are highly-correlated with “successful resistance campaigns,” notes Chenoweth’s report.

Marie Principe, an academic at the Wilson Center, which focuses on global affairs, came to a similar assertion in a 2017 report. “Activists consistently reported that women were better able to remain nonviolent, even in the face of violent government repression,” she noted in her report.

5) The Hammer of Witches

In her newsletter

Dr King's Curiosities

, Rebekah King introduces what she posits may be “the most misogynistic book ever written”: The Malleus Maleficarum or The Hammer of Witches (recently out in a new edition, edited by Peter Maxwell-Stuart). She writes:

The Malleus was originally published in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer also called ‘Henricus Institor’ or more commonly, ‘Institoris,’ a German churchman who was extremely worried about the terrible threat of witchcraft. His ‘Hammer of Witches’ explored how to identify and prosecute people who used magic to do harm.

In part 1, Institoris establishes that harmful magic is real, that it’s on the rise, and that women are particularly susceptible to becoming agents of the devil. Women are ‘more given to fleshly lusts’ than men ‘as is clear from her many acts of carnal filthiness.’ He uses the story of Genesis, where Eve was supposedly shaped from Adam’s rib, as proof that women are fundamentally curved or warped in nature: ‘since she is an unfinished animal, she is always being deceptive.’

And also

Interestingly, Peter Maxwell-Stuart offers a caution in his new edition to attempts to psychoanalyse and thus condemn Institoris as a man defined by unusual woman-hate and paranoia, making the careful point that ‘Institoris was no more misogynistic than any other writer of his period… his animus against women was driven by contemporary physiological theory about their insatiable sexual appetite which gave an easy access to Satan and his evil spirits.’ He also points out that the other witch trials where Institoris had learned his craft had similarly singled out women: we can’t, perhaps, say anything too definite about personal motivations.  

By sheer coincidence, last week I learned about this very same book while preparing for an episode of The Prospect Podcast, which I co-host with Ellen Halliday. Here’s a link to the pod if you want to find out what The Hammer of Witches has to do with conspiracy theories and the US election.

Bonus: This book sounds amazing | “geopolitical manhood” "| the lineage of the female cop

Thanks so much for reading. See you next time.