Witches and witch hunters: a feminist parable

The other day I had an epiphany; I realized there's one overarching reason why I'm so dead-set on writing this supernatural sci-fi romance novel.

It's not marketable, by any means. My "romance" novel involves an organized crime syndicate, a coven of spy-witches, a systemic tech-enhanced witch hunting culture, two groups of warring found families — and, in between all that, a celebrity witch hunter who falls in love with his mark. That's...a lot.

But I've got it in my head that it needs to be written, because there are precious few stories where I get to explore what might be going through men's heads when weird patriarchal nonsense is going on.

Sure, I could go on Threads or even the dreaded X and read scores and scores of men yelling at women for making them single and lonely or whatever (and if you try to tell them they're perhaps women have nothing to do with you'll find your DMs flooded with death threats). Every once in a while though, I'll meet a guy who says the quiet part loud and admits that even he is afraid of some men who subscribe to that ideology. Even men are afraid of other men who commit to enforcing an invisible hierarchy, even among themselves.

So I'm writing a feminist parable about the "ideal man:" stoic, dependable, physically strong, incredibly intelligent, wealthy, and hyper-sexual. The catch is that he's trapped in a system propped up by his own complicity, made out to be the mascot of witch hunting despite his natural passion and gift for studying witchcraft. He can't step away from the limelight, the performance, to pursue what (or who) he truly cares about, because if he does, the system won't punish him — it'll kill his passions and the people he loves, one by one, until he's too broken to do anything but his job.

Sound familiar? Maybe not. But this is the world I envisioned based on the stories of the few men who've been brave enough to tell me what being a man is like for them — without somehow making it all women's fault.

David Foster Wallace's commencement speech for Kenyon College's class of 2005 told this story of two fish:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Many men (and women, and even some enbys) are fish who've forgotten what water is; we don't know, or haven't thought critically about what we personally can do to make this hellscape we're living through a lighter load. We've forgotten how to imagine a better world, if we ever knew at all.

My story's world is well and truly not a better one. It's a dystopia where supernatural women are hunted down, and two factions of powerful men pat themselves on the back for having done so. It is what I imagine to be the logical conclusion of Bay Area tech bro culture, should witchcraft suddenly hop on the scene: male oligarchs, threatened by the arrival of exclusively feminine power, join forces to ensure their submission. Politics, law enforcement, the criminal underground...every branch of power bands together to keep women afraid and magic out of sight.

It causes a culture of performance. And just like in real life, where some people (not enough yet, in my opinion) are railing against an onslaught of AI and the fakeness of social media, characters get tired. They lose too much. They put on masks that don't fit, and find themselves exposed and vulnerable, again and again. They try to play their roles, willingly or through coercion, until one day they just can't anymore.

That's when shit gets good.

Writing this novel is helping me articulate the little tidbits of knowledge I learn from men who've had the courage to turn away from their patriarchal conditioning.

It lowkey feels like I'm writing a novel based on shounen manga rules: most popular manga are categorized as "shounen" (for boys) and written with a teen boy audience in mind, because that's where the marketing money and merch sales live. But some manga writers write these huge, dramatic love stories, then weave a big save-the-world story around it, complete with flashy fight scenes that'll rake in the big bucks. It's not "for boys," but as long as it's labeled as such and has the same entertainment value, everybody gets to enjoy it.

I never thought I would actually write a 100,000+ word novel with a dude as a main character, to be honest. For the last few years I was certain I would remain staunchly misandrist in my creative life.

But I really, really want to do this little project justice. I want women to enjoy a power fantasy where the witch gets to hunt the hunter back. I want men to enjoy a power fantasy where the hunter finds a way to stop hunting and be himself, in spite of everything.

No idea if it's working yet, but I won't know for sure unless I try. So here goes nothing.