Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive by Kristen J. Sollee

Author:Kristen J. Sollee [Sollee, Kristen J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Published: 2017-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

QUEERING THE WITCH: PORN, PLEASURE & REPRESENTATION

“Society’s dread of women who own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations of proper female sexuality, persists.”

—The Feminist Porn Book

From a contemporary perspective, early modern depictions of witches cavorting naked with limbs entwined are unquestionably queer. In Hans Baldung Grien’s “New Year’s Wish with Three Witches” from c. 1514, a young witch with untamed hair fondles her vulva while a crone caresses the back of another young witch crouching on all fours. This may scream hot, intergenerational lesbian threesome to us, but to God-fearing men of the day, it symbolized demonic sexuality first and foremost.

Sapphic signifiers abound in portrayals of the witch.

Sherry Velasco explains in Lesbians in Early Modern Spain that “the eroticized body of the witch in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images revealed both a voyeuristic interest in female sexuality and a fear of women appropriating male sexual power.” Some witch imagery was also giving voice to “deep-seated male fears of lesbian sexuality, with its threat of impotence and castration,” she adds.

There are few recorded instances of lesbian witches during the European trials, but “evidence is scant but suggestive,” says Anne Barstow in Witchcraze. She details a lurid—yet partwarming—tale of one French mother superior accused of witchcraft for performing cunnilingus and seducing other nuns with a strap-on. Lyndal Roper affirms in Witch Craze that lesbian witch accusations were rarely documented but notes one Protestant tract that warned of lesbian witches ensnaring naive, unsuspecting wives. As the men creating anti-witch narratives were presumably heterosexual, Satanic sex was most frequently characterized as penetrative, between a female witch and a male Devil.

The witch has always embodied the sexual fears of men, whether they be of women finding sexual pleasure without them, emasculating them, or castrating them. Portrayals of the woman-as-witch have thus reflected an unquenchable desire for the female sex mixed with fear, straddling horror and pleasure, disgust and arousal.

Today, pornography is one site where the battle for female sexual representation is being fought. Some women have the privilege of creating their own sexual representations for the spectator of their choosing—one who isn’t by default a cisgender, heterosexual male—while others are harnessing or subverting the traditional male gaze for their own devices.

Despite this, pornography remains anathema to many feminists. The so-called “Feminist Sex Wars” that began percolating in the late 1970s reached their zenith in the 1980s and produced two ideological camps: anti-porn feminists and pro-sex or anti-censorship feminists. The former believed the misogyny inherent in mainstream pornography and explicit media promotes rape and sexism and should be stopped at all costs—and through government intervention when necessary. The latter believed that such a view amounts to sexual puritanism and promotes censorship, and that consensual sexual expression in all forms should be a protected right.

During this deep ideological conflict, feminist pornography as a genre began to flesh out, and the sex-positive feminist movement solidified around the idea that sexual freedom is a fundamental human right, and it is up to each individual to decide what consensual sexual expression means to them.

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