Month: September 2021

How Satanism conquered America

Proverbially, the Devil has all the best tunes. Does he have the best books too? Apparently so, at least where soft porn is concerned: last week, it was reported that Xavier Nobell, a prominent Catholic exorcist and bishop, has resigned from the Church in order to be with his lover, a writer of “erotic-satanic” fiction.

The whole story evoked The Exorcist, which came out a few years before I was born and was considered the ne plus ultra of shocking content into my tween years in the nineties. But even setting aside the fact that the other “side” seems to have won, Nobell’s story evoked less shock than nostalgia.

In 2021, even the idea of a priest as the main protagonist in a battle between good and evil feels, well, very 1973. These days, while there’s plenty of Satanist imagery about, overtly anti-Christian symbols seem either banal (Lil Nas selling Satan trainers) or just naff (WitchTok).

But if devilish imagery mostly feels a bit cringe, the Devil himself has gone mainstream. If being deliberately anti-Christian pour épater la bourgeoisie feels exhausted, for the new, post-Christian bourgeoisie Satan now reads like the good guy. And in the hands of this class, the Devil’s proverbial pride, self-regard and refusal to yield isn’t just celebrated — it’s on its way to becoming the established religion of the United States of America.

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Is there a feminist case for virtue?

I’ve been reviewing like mad: first Amia Srinivasan’s The Right To Sex, which I found so evasive I concluded it was a coded cry for help from inside the woke ivory tower. And secondly, Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue, which I argue here makes a compelling case for trans activism as a legitimate daughter of second-wave feminism – complete with the ambivalent and sometimes matricidal mother/daughter dynamics that pervaded that movement. No wonder the so-called ‘TERF wars’ are so bitter.

Elsewhere, I proposed in American Affairs that what we understand as ‘feminism’ is to a great extent an effect of industrial-era economic shifts, that triggered wholesale re-negotiation of sex roles. But further, that we’re now leaving the industrial era, and thus once again re-negotiating sex roles; and if we try to do this on the industrial-era yardstick for what constitutes women’s interests, we’re going to end up somewhere very dark indeed.

I agree with the intersectionalists that feminism can’t be understood as universal; applying that logic across history opens the possibility that twentieth-century feminist ideals that were legitimately in our interests then may no longer be so now. And all these themes: economic transitions, matricide, woke feminism and trans activism, come together in reflections this week on yet another book: Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Legacy.

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