‘Are you now or have you ever been’ a sex-harasser witch, sir?

To understand how men, too, can be the target of witch hunts, some historical perspective is required.

In 1485, at the beginning of the Early Modern period in England, the English word “witch” was used to refer to either male or female spell-casters.

That the English and Europeans more generally, came to associate being a witch with being female owes a great deal to a book that was, for almost two centuries, second only to the Bible in popularity: Heinrich Kramer’s witch-hunting manual, the “Malleus Maleficarum” (“Hammer of Witches”), first published in 1487.

Kramer, a German Dominican monk, was not the first to write up a handbook for witch hunters. He benefited, however, from three factors: the fairly recent development of a new communications technology (the printing press) and the oncoming Protestant Reformation, Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, and nascent nationalism (all of which shared a need to find and persecute heretics and political enemies).

Finally, there was his systematic emphasis on the belief that women were much more likely to become magical evildoers than were men.

Arguing that women’s lust is at the root of all witchcraft, Kramer downplays both the numbers and overall importance of male witches.

His use of black-magic folklore is often similar in content to blood accusations against Jews, and his blurring of the lines between sorcery and heresy (particularly in reference to the Biblical injunction “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”) also blurs the line between zero tolerance and maximum punishment.

The Malleus’s combination of misogyny, demonization, and rigid orthodoxy contributed vitally to the witch-persecution frenzies now sometimes called The Great Witch Hunt, which occurred in waves throughout Europe from roughly 1500 to 1700.

Today, also aided by the fairly recent development of new communications technologies (cable news, the internet, social media), we are making up for Heinrich Kramer’s negligence and giving men their overdue time under the witch-hammer as well.

Nothing in our current witch-hunt has quite the sexualized violence that made the Malleus a bestseller for two centuries. We don’t kill sexual harassers, just their careers (and not even those, if they can still win elections). We have even managed to flip the gender-doctrine of the Malleus: Men’s lust is the root of all masculine witchcraft (patriarchal privilege).

Although not bestseller stuff, the present media mix of righteous indignation and prurient titillation works well enough for the 24-hour news cycle. And the irony of it works, too: As David Frum recently asked, “So who is ready for a world in which Democrats force Al Franken out of the Senate and Republicans vote Roy Moore in?”

(Only half of that worst-case scenario came true. That’s something, at least.)

During the Great Witch Hunt, the politically astute found many ways to channel, to their own advantage, the lust of the politically naive for revenge (a lust shared by both females and males).

Much more recently, ideas and movements begun on the Left (political correctness, identity politics, “truth” and “facts” as merely socially-constructed objects in a post-structuralist “situated discourse”) have been appropriated and weaponized by the Right (see Donald Trump’s having run and won as the white-identity “populist” post-truth candidate of an increasingly ethno-nationalist Republican Party).

That the more patriarchal and theocratic party’s interests should be served by a nominally feminist sisterhood – forged from the revelation that a culturally-powerful man had assaulted and silenced women, but able only to displace its frustration and wrath onto less culturally-powerful males – is a deeply ironic story as new as Trump, his accusers, #MeToo, and the zero-tolerance/maximum punishment of workplace harassers.

It also is as old as Ovid’s ancient tale of Tereus, Philomela, Procne, and Itys.

Perhaps, too, the story of “whose interests are being served” helps explain why so many evangelical pastors supported Donald Trump, despite his recorded brag that, when it came to many a woman, he “caughte hire by the queinte” – as Geoffrey Chaucer (another translator of Ovid’s tale) put it, over six centuries ago.

No one wants to defend child molestation, serial sexual assault or even an unwanted kiss, but it is a mistake to view those as being “all one” – and all deserving of the same punishment.

Such dragnet logic succeeds only in painting all men who engage in any of a broad spectrum of behaviors as psychologically and ideologically the same, and that’s ignorance to rival the witch-burners’ –whether it comes from #MAGA red hats or #MeToo pink hats.

This story was originally published December 15, 2017 at 4:11 PM with the headline "‘Are you now or have you ever been’ a sex-harasser witch, sir?."