Only Lindy West, one of our foremost thinkers on gender, could capture the agony and the ecstasy of 21st century life in one slim volume. In The Witches Are Coming, her searing new collection of essays, she unveils her unifying theory of America: that our steady diet of pop culture created by and for embittered, entitled white men is directly responsible for our sociopolitical moment.

Adam Sandler, South Park, and Pepe the Frog all come under her withering scrutiny in this uproarious, hyper-literate analysis of the link between meme culture and male mediocrity. In these 17 stellar essays, West crafts a blistering indictment of the systems that oppress us—the government that denies our rights, the media that denies our stories, the society that denies our dignity.



Yet even so, West’s work is always threaded through with hope—an unshakable belief that we can and will triumph over the forces that seek to break us. Coupled with her laser-focused cultural criticism, what emerges is a portrait of hope amid the uncertainty. Esquire spoke with West about meme culture, representation in media, and how to stay skeptical when the government is hellbent on suckering you.

Esquire: Part of what makes your essays so remarkable is that there’s so much fusion going on. You synthesize pop culture and politics; you pull together many disparate threads. Where does an essay start for you?

Lindy West: Some of them start big and some of them start small. Sometimes the big concept will be nagging at me and I’ll come up with that first. I knew I wanted to write about Adam Sandler and Ted Bundy. Other times it’s just a little riff, where I’m goofing around riffing about pockets and then I realize with great joy that I could tenuously connect it to some other thing that’s been kicking around in my head in an illustrative way. I’m not a very organized writer, so it all happens by magic. I always have a list of things nagging at me in my head, and when I discover any sort of link between two of them, it’s such a precious gift. If you can connect different things, if you can say, “This conceptually is the same as this,” or, “This is doing the same thing that this other thing is doing,” I think that’s where you really start to understand the systems that define our lives.

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ESQ: In the fantastic essay about Lil' Bub, you write “It’s imperative to remember that our most catastrophic impulses often start small, banal. Virality is compartmentalization, turning the complexities of life into decontextualized snapshots. It is a fun way to pass the time. It is a terrible way to run a society.” Meme culture started small—what do you see as the inevitable end point of it? Where does it lead us?

LW: I would be so rich if I knew this. I love meme culture. I am one of those strange old women who spends all day watching TikToks. I have two teenagers, so I feel like I live in a house of memes. There are ways in which it hinders communication, and there are ways in which it enhances communication. Sometimes it’s so satisfying and so cathartic when a meme sums up something that you never quite articulated, but you’ve always felt. So many memes are a picture of a dog making a face, and the caption is, “Me when I realize there’s no toilet paper.” Then people say, “Yeah! I do make that face!” That’s a really satisfying tiny piece of entertainment and connection.



In another way, it’s easier to send someone a meme and end the conversation than it is to actually engage. I also feel a million years old saying that. I was thinking the other day about when I was a teenager and I listened to the radio all the time. Talk radio was all about drops—they’d play the same audio clips over and over in different situations and different contexts. They would become come running jokes—that’s just a meme. The same things repeat themselves and replicate themselves over new technologies.

Mike Bridavsky holds his cat, Lil Bub at the 1st annual Snowcats Cat Convention at the EXDO Event Center December 08, 2018. Lil Bub was born with a multitude of genetic anomalies including extreme dwarfism, which means that she will stay kitten-sized for the rest of her life. Andy Cross

ESQ: When we think about memes as agents of connection, it’s easy to forget that not all memes are based in humor. Take astrology memes or spirituality memes, for example.

LW: Totally. I think that there’s a lot of power in humor. I use comedy as a coping mechanism; a lot of people do. When it comes to social justice issues, people are historically frustrated and exhausted—they’re tired of trying to convince the rest of their country that they deserve equality, justice, or the various things that we’ve been fighting for forever. There’s such a relief in seeing a meme that articulates some facet of that feeling, and thinking, “Oh, good. Now I don’t have to do it for a second. I can just post this and it can convey what I feel.” Maybe that’s self-care. There’s something so powerful about laughing at something scary or painful or harmful, like the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses Twitter to roast old Republican men. That’s meme culture. That’s an incredibly savvy deployment of current, present-day internet culture, and I am all for it.

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ESQ: You write of the media available during your childhood, “There was no Adam Sandler for girls—no one making blockbuster comedies about girls having fun and being gross, no one telling us that we were good the way we were and that the joke was on the rest of the world.” Is there now an Adam Sandler for girls? What media do girls still need more of?

LW: If you look at the numbers of how women are represented onscreen and behind the camera, it’s still pretty bad. But there are so many incredible female comics with massive reach, power, and influence. You have Tiffany Haddish, Amy Schumer, and Melissa McCarthy, who’s a major movie star. It’s a hard question to answer because the landscape has changed so much. Now there are ten million networks and streaming services. It’s not like The Movie comes out and everyone goes to see The Movie, which is how it felt in the eighties and nineties. Maybe there isn’t anyone as totally dominant and ubiquitous as Adam Sandler was at the time, but certainly media feels vastly different. There have been huge strides in representation that mean a lot to me personally, but you can always use more.

As much as everyone loves to talk about body positivity, there’s very little body diversity onscreen. Pretty, straight, cis-gendered white girls still dominate women’s stories. It’s just business as usual in a lot of ways, but I’m always hungry for new stories, and for things I haven’t seen before. There’s still so much beautiful human experience that should be centered and honored. Hopefully the people who live those lives will get paid for that work rather than white creators making stories about them. However, I do feel really encouraged by how far we’ve come in my lifetime. It’s pretty incredible.

Lindy West speaks onstage during the Hulu "Shrill" FYC screening at the Television Academy on May 22, 2019 in North Hollywood, California. Erik Voake

ESQ: Speaking of the media landscape, I so enjoyed “How to Be a Girl,” your essay about the cultural messaging around womanhood. You write in that essay, ”Figuring out who you are is always a triangulation of what you know and what you see.” How can we be smarter consumers of media, and how can we raise our children that way, too?

LW: I’m a big advocate of talking to kids, and of putting trust in kids to be able to understand what you’re saying. My husband and I have always talked to our daughters like they’re people and been really honest with them about the world, sometimes in ways that they hate. If they’re obsessed with a TV show that seems toxic to us, we’re sometimes not nice about it, but I want them to know that they can demand more from the media. It’s important to constantly communicate and to make sure that they feel comfortable asking you questions, because it can be a minefield when they go out and try to find answers on their own. Even stuff that’s uncomfortable to talk about or complicated, it’s worse if you don’t.

My stepdaughters have me for a stepmom, so they’re drowning under a mountain of feminist tote bags, but they still go to school every day, where they’re around kids from all kinds of other backgrounds and kids who have vastly different belief systems than ours. They’re also consuming the internet untethered, and God knows what’s on there. At a certain point, you have to trust yourself, let go, and say, “I equipped them as best I could. I’m here if they have questions or need to talk. I’m just going to keep living my values in front of them.” They’re human beings, so they get to define what they think and who they are. You have to let go. You can’t control them at a certain point, and I think that’s a good thing. We have to do our best, to be honest and open and curious and thoughtful and compassionate.

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ESQ: In one essay, you write about the #ShoutYourAbortion movement and how “personal storytelling is an engine of humanization. In another essay, you write about how men need to stick their necks out for women. Should men also be telling stories of how abortion touches their lives?

LW: That would be great. The reality is that abortion has absolutely impacted the life of every single person in this country. Whether you’ve had one or not, whether you have a partner who’s had one or not, you certainly know women who’ve had abortions, and they’ve shaped your life in various ways, whether they’re in politics or whether they’re your boss. Every woman living a public life as part of the world who’s had an abortion and who has been able to live that life because she was not forced to become a parent, every single thing that she goes out and does that influences the world, it's because she was able to have that abortion. There’s no way to quantify that. We don’t know how far those ripples go.

The fact is that abortion absolutely impacts everyone, and I love to hear from men about abortion. The fact that men feel that they can just step aside and let women handle this abortion thing is infuriating. We don’t need men to center themselves in the movement for reproductive rights and reproductive justice, but we could use some sweat and bodies and time. It’s not just people who get pregnant who should be responsible for protecting this right that absolutely benefits the life of every single person in this nation.

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ESQ: What role did South Park play in giving rise to the alt-right, in your opinion?

LW: It’s all speculation, but the line certainly adds up. I think that South Park fetishized irreverence in this way that was completely all-consuming for at least the first ten years that it was on. I don’t hear people talk about South Park quite as much now, but for a long time, it saturated everything. Obviously irreverence has its place, but some things do deserve reverence. That sort of untethered omnidirectional irreverence is not particularly helpful when you’re trying to salvage a wildly unjust, oppressive, and unequal society. The alt-right feels like a full generation of boys who think that Cartman is aspirational. Good luck with that.

ESQ: In another essay, you write, ”One malicious side effect of Americans’ bootstrap ethos (itself just a massive grift to empower the snickering rich) is that it conditions people to cheer at deregulation, to beg and plead for the removal of consumer protections. We are literally asking to be conned; we are a smorgasbord for the most unscrupulous and the least deserving. Being a giant fucking sucker is as American as school shootings.” It seems self-evident that the system will victimize us. How can we develop a healthy skepticism to keep ourselves from being taken in?

LW: This is the partisan divide. Billionaires are voting and dumping money into the political system so they can stay billionaires. Democrats are fucked up and certainly far from perfect, but the Republican party has convinced average people to, for instance, vote against having healthcare. I don’t know how you do that or how you undo it. I’m not calling these people stupid; I’m not calling them evil. It feels like the line doesn’t connect, and it’s absolutely baffling to me. I’m sure many books have been written by people smarter than me explaining this, but it’s just a bizarre leap. It’s this bizarre mental gymnastics to so rabidly believe that you yourself don’t deserve healthcare. I don’t know how to fix that. I don’t know how to bridge that chasm. I guess it’s a lot of fear-mongering. People are really afraid, and people’s fear is deliberately stoked by disingenuous bad actors. But culture change does happen eventually--it’s hard and slow, but things do change. The more you can stay on message, the more you can keep saying the same thing over and over, it starts to eventually sink into the groundwater.

In terms of us as individuals, how do we avoid falling into traps and getting suckered? Be curious; read the news. Don’t get fatigue. Don’t get lazy. And especially for white people: don’t assume that you already know everything. I think that’s a really easy pitfall where white people tend to think of ourselves as the reasonable default person whose instincts must be right. That’s of course absolutely ridiculous and untrue. What you need to be doing is seeking out diverse opinions and experiences--let yourself sit with the reality that you don’t know anything. Let the world in.

Adrienne Westenfeld Assistant Editor Adrienne Westenfeld is a writer and editor at Esquire, where she covers books and culture.

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