“The Witches of Eastwick” is pretty sexist.

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

The Witches of Eastwick, by John Updike, is a pretty sexist book. Let me sum it up for you:

*There are women! And they are witches! Also: they are whores! They have a lot of sex. WITH OTHER WOMENS’ MEN. Whores.
*Also: they menstruate
*Also: They get pregnant and lactate OH MY GOD IT’S SUCH A MIRACLE LET’S FETISHIZE IT and then also let’s talk about pee and how women apparently all have shy bladder syndrome all the time.
*Women: They totally murder men. Just because. It’s what they do. They get bored of a dude and they kill him. Or suck the life out of him. You know. Whichever. Vampiric harpy witch women! GOD! They just prey on men! All the time! CONSTANTLY! When they aren’t having orgies, that is.
*Women: Get them tipsy and in a hot tub and they totally lezz out at the drop of a hat.
*Women: They can’t live without men and after they get dumped by a grotesque dude who is secretly gay (gay men! They’re the pits!) they will create men out of nothing and magic so they can be mated and happy again. Because a woman without a man is nothing!

The plot of the book goes like this:

There’s these women in New England who are petty, vindictive bitches. They are in a coven together. They are all widowed or divorced and man! Do they love to fuck! So they fuck the husbands of other women, taking on a maternal role in their lives, while hating those same wives. They hate them so! They are full of hate. And they are not above murdering these women, or driving the men to murder them. Just, you know, for larffs.

Anyway, one is a sculptor of crappy little vacation trinkets, one is a mediocre cellist, and one writes a gossip column for the local small town paper. They aren’t even good at what they do professionally. Also: they are really shitty, negligent mothers. This is mentioned. A lot. Shortly after hexing an elderly woman and causing her to fall over, which could have resulted in broken bones or death (she was boring! she deserved it! how dare she discuss gardening with a member of the gardening club who is also a petty, vindictive witch who is a bad mom and a whore??!!?), this really grotesque dude rolls into town. He’s hairy and drools and wears awful clothing and is incredibly rude.

The witches pretty much immediately start rubbing themselves all over him because… I guess… women just love cock that much? I don’t know. He kind of pits them against each other and he knows they’re witches and it just… none of it really makes sense. They wind up working together to kill this chick he ends up marrying (for her money, he’s a con artist) and he skips out in the night with her brother (because he’s gay. EW! gay. That’s so gross.) leaving the witches behind. Which is when they magic up men for themselves.

I haven’t seen the movie in a while, but I remember liking it. The women, you know, are powerful and don’t use that power JUST to put other women down. In the movie, if I’m remembering correctly, the dude is the devil and he tempts them to evil and then they’re all “dude! This is the devil! he’s evil!” and they take their power back for themselves. Also they all have babies, I don’t even know. WHATEVER HOLLYWOOD. But even saddling them all with devil babies is still a step up from this book which is just sexist and craptacular.

I had better hopes for this book. I could tell it was shitty from, like, the very first page. I kept reading it anyway, internets. For you. For yooooouuuuuuuu.

Oh, LJ

Live Journal is doing that thing again where its tubes are filled with thought honey, and it goes slow and won't load and is just balky and awful. Wonder if something specific is causing that?

Hm!