Transcription
Rachel, the average American woman is the most educated, most financially independent, and most free woman in human history. She's also the loneliest, most depressed, and least likely to have kids. Why do you think women are so unhappy in 2026?
>> That's the million-dollar question. There's actually been two uh large-scale studies done trying to answer that question. I think the first came out in 2009. It was called the paradox of declining female happiness. And in this study, the authors in their summary said that uh women have reported, you know, this is based on women's surveys. When you're asking women their opinion on how they are doing in life, how they feel about things, um they're reporting higher levels of unhappiness, like you said, loneliness, depression, uh than ever before. So if we go back to the '70s, which is arguably kind of the tipping point where feminism became the dominant ethos, uh if you go back to the early '70s where they asked women these questions, they largely reported being pretty content. Um and now in the 2000s, we have 26% of all American women on at least one psychiatric drug. We have higher rates of fetal alcohol syndrome and alcoholism among women than we've ever recorded before. uh and women just overall reporting dissatisfaction, unhappiness, a feeling of uh being really torn trying to have it all, trying to have a career and be a career woman and also have a family and and do all of that.
Uh women don't know what to do with relationships because on the one hand they want men who make more than they do. They want uh men who are higher achieving than they are, yet this creates a paradox. Whereas women have become the number one earners of college degrees. They have uh now got salaries that compete with men. Uh and they've got more equality than ever before. They're finding that the men are not suitable to marry. They're finding that uh you know they just can't find a guy who's on their level or higher, which is what they really want. So we've created like a paradox where by giving women everything that at least feminism told us they wanted which was full equality uh independence from men so that we could choose a husband based on you know who we love and not who we need that this would make women happier and we're finding ourselves in a position where women are reporting the highest levels of unhappiness ever. They're actually even three times more likely than men now to have common mental health issues. Women have always been more prone to mental health issues than men since we started tracking that, but it's gone up. It's gotten worse. The disparity has grown. Women are finding themselves in a conundrum where they've got all the things that they were told would make them happy and they're finding that they're more dissatisfied than ever.
And what often happens, you'll see these viral clips on the internet of women in their 30s and 40s, you know, sitting alone in their car crying, saying, "I did all the things I was supposed to do. I followed the prescription and I'm unhappy. I'm stressed out. I'm alone. I can't find a husband. I won't have a family. Am I am I going to die by myself? What did I do? I can't go back." So I for me, it's a really tragic thing for women.
>> So, you would boil it down to women are unhappy because they're lonely, because they're not getting married and they're not having kids.
>> I think that's a big part of it. And I think it's also uh we put so much pressure and responsibility on women to do it all, be it all, and have it all. I really experienced a lot of that myself in my early 20s. So, after I got through K through 12 high school, um I was always a smart kid. I was always in like advanced classes preparing for college. I was given the message that you're definitely going to college. You know, you've got to go. You're too smart. You can't waste your intellectual capacity uh by not going to school and having an important job. That's what you're going to do like from kindergarten on. And by the time I got done with 12th grade, I thought, I think I just want to get married and have kids. Like, I really just want to marry my boyfriend, start a family, and be a mom. Like, that's that's what I want to do. and maybe someday if I want to have a career, I can do that later. People thought I was insane. Everybody around me, my parents, my friends, uh, pretty much everyone around me just thought that was totally nuts. Like, what? You're not going to go to college? You have a full ride scholarship and you're not going to take it? You're going to regret it? It's going to be terrible. Your life's going to be over.
Um, so it was like, well, what do I do here? Cuz I want what if I want to be a mom and have kids? Like, I want to raise them myself. How am I going to do that if I'm gone 40 to 50 hours a week? Especially if I get a career that's like very demanding. Um, you know, like if I want to be a doctor or something, where does that leave room for raising my kids, I'm going to have to outsource that to someone else? And I didn't like that idea. And when I said I thought that that was kind of silly and inefficient, I thought, isn't that silly? I'm I'm having children and I'm going to pay some other stranger who isn't their mother maybe 12 bucks an hour or something to spend all day with them and I might get to see them for a couple hours at night and on the weekend and that's it.
>> And meanwhile they're not even with their kids.
>> Exactly. So I thought we're all just shift. It's like we're playing musical chairs with the children and it's like well you raise mine so that I can go to work and then someone else will raise yours so that you can go to work watching my kids. And when I said, I think that seems silly. Who came up with this system? It sounds terrible to me. It was like I was challenging this deeply held dogma, this like preciously held dogma that like, well, you don't want to be enslaved, do you? And I was like, I don't know that going to work for a corporation and having to pay half of what I make to have someone else raise my kids, I don't know, that kind of sounds a little bit like like slavery to me more than having a family. But there was just this this idea that if I didn't have my own money and my own career, the only guy who was going to be interested was someone who wanted to take advantage of me and hurt me and wanted me to be vulnerable and not able to escape.
>> You kind of gave the most important part of your backstory to understand why you view uh feminism the way you do, but I want to know about your parents and your childhood. like what's the most important part of your childhood that shaped maybe why you chose to write your book and some of your views today?
>> When I was 9 years old, my parents got divorced and um you know, my dad sat us down and explained that my mom had found somebody new. Uh she was going to divorce him um and that he had to move out. And I remember asking him, wait, if if mom got a boyfriend, you know, you're not supposed to do that. That, you know, that's against the rules. Why do you have to leave? That doesn't make sense. And uh my dad kind of got like tears in his eyes. And then I told him I I I remember saying, "I have a lump in my throat. It kind of hurts right here." And then he just kind of lost it. Um and you know, my mother really didn't want to explain. It was just like dad's got to go and this other guy is going to move in. And um that was kind of like the beginning of everything changing for me and my sister. And I remember thinking and and I had people like adults in my life when I would ask, you know, one of my mom's friends was babysitting and I was like, why just I know my mom wants a new boyfriend, but why does that mean that my dad has to move out now this guy's going to move in? I why can't me and my sister have our dad? And you know, I'm trying to figure this out as a 9-year-old. And the answer I kept getting was, "Well, your mom needs to be happy." And I thought, "Well, yeah, I want my mom to be happy. Of course, I love my mom, but what about me being happy? And what about my dad being happy? And what about my sister being happy?" So, that was kind of like the first seeds of me wondering, why is she the only person that matters in this equation? Shouldn't we all matter?
Um, and nobody had a good answer. So as I got older, uh my mother had been kind of radicalized in college as a Marxist and then started writing or reading Marxist literature like the mists of Avalon. It's like a feminist retelling of the Camelot legend. Uh and it was from this very like Marxist feminist perspective. And she kind of adopted this view that like men are bad and evil, especially white men, the evil white men that have all the power are bad. um uh the intersectional stuff like the more oppressed you are, the more truth you have and the more righteous you must be. And if you have money or you own a business or you're a white person or you're a male, you must be bad. You must be oppressing someone to have those things. And that was kind of her worldview. So most of the week living with mom, that's the stuff I would kind of hear filtered through. You know, it kind of trickles out as you're talking about things growing up. Then I go to my dad's and he was a business owner. He was a a Rush Limbaugh guy, you know, in the car. We'd be listening to Rush Limbaugh on the way to, you know, my orthodontist appointments or something. So, I grew up listening to him with dad and my dad would explain things from a completely different worldview. Like things are based on merit. Um, it depends how hard you work for things cuz a lot of people aren't willing to work hard and those who are can potentially get ahead even if they maybe started out behind. You know, my dad would say, you know, I didn't grow up with money, but I'm doing a lot better now than my dad was because I put in 14-hour days. I have better ideas than the other guys in in the same industry I work in. Um, so you earn your way in the world. Whereas my mom's view was completely different. You know, it was everybody deserves and you only don't have because someone else has.
So these two completely opposite conflicting worldviews that you get as a kid, you kind of start having to learn to think things through and try to figure out, well, which one is correct? How do I know which one is correct? And how do I filter through these ideas to figure out which worldview is more accurate? What should I follow? Because I'm getting completely different directions from both parents. And I remember the best piece of advice my dad ever gave me um especially being a woman. He said, "Self-esteem is not based on external validation. You will never get a sense of self-esteem, a true sense of it, from people telling you you're pretty or telling you they like you or saying you did a good job. You get your real self-esteem from making good decisions and learning that you can trust yourself to do the right thing." Um, and that was one of the first pieces that I felt really clicked for me. Uh, that, you know, maybe dad's on to something. Maybe his worldview is more correct. And as I went through school and saw that, you know, if we had a group project or something, often times people would want to be on my team. Oh, I want to do the group project with Rachel because they know, uh, I care about it. I'm going to try hard and I'm going to make I want to get an A on the project. So, so they could sit back and kind of relax and kind of let me do all the work. And I thought this must be that merit-based stuff dad's talking about, right? So, yeah, just my experiences going through life, I felt like my dad's worldview was a lot more matched up with reality than my mother's idea that uh people just deserve. We're all just born deserving what we want and someone needs to provide it and if they don't, it's because of evil or oppression in the world.
>> You have a book, Adult Feminism. Do you think a big reason you decided to write this book was trying to maybe understand what could have led to the society that shaped her views?
>> Oh, definitely. Um, and I I wrote it with the idea in mind that I have four daughters and I hope to have a lot of grandkids. If the Lord grants me that, I would be so happy. And I I wanted to make sense of the world like you said. Uh what kind of society shapes a woman the way that it did my mother and so many other women like her. Like if you look at the popular culture, you look at things like Sex in the City. You look at every pop star like Sabrina Carpenter right now is making a multi-million dollar a year industry off of cute little man-hating songs and things like this, you know? And I was trying to make sense of how did we get here? Because uh my mom wasn't around a lot growing up because of all her issues. I would get sent to the to my grandparents house all the time. And so I grew up mostly with my grandmas. And uh one of them just turned 100 on April 1st and she was probably the most influential person on me and again got a totally different view of the world from her than I did from my mother and she was much more traditional and a very like practical, hardworking lady. um not political at all. Grandma didn't care about politics. She wasn't talking about politics. She was worried about, you know, getting the house cleaned, cooking dinner, um taking care of the grandkids, those sort of things. And I feel like, um the world she grew up in was so different from the one that created my mother and from the one that shaped me. Almost everybody today kind of looks around and we all know that like something's off, something's not working. Men and women are kind of pitted against each other and we have these dating apps and like nobody's happy and nobody's having kids and nobody knows what to do about it and everybody knows that something is wrong or something is off but nobody really knows what it is and it's it's right in our face but because we're swimming in feminist waters just like a fish doesn't know it's swimming in water we don't realize that that's what it is and that's why I was like I' I've really got to write a book because I feel like I could explain now that I have done so much research and read so history. I spent years reading early feminist writings, you know, going back to Mary Wollstonecraft or even before, which is something nobody does unless you're going to college for gender studies. And then of course you're going to read it through the lens of feminism was wonderful and it's awesome and it's great. But me reading it through more of a skeptical lens of like I just want to know what happened. You know, I hadn't even decided that it was evil or satanic. I didn't know any of that. I was just like I want to know what happened. I'm curious. Not what she wrote, but who is this person that wrote this and why did they write it and who funded it and who >> yeah uh made it popular.
>> Yeah. Why did somebody like Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 1700s at the height of the revolutionary period? Why did she write Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is like the first big feminist uh publication, >> the the kind of the thing that started it all? Um why did she write that? Like what was going on in her life? what was the society like around her? What things prompted her to want to write such a thing? How did people respond to it? So, I spent years reading that stuff. And then once I felt like, okay, I've got like a really clear picture on what I think happened. I want to write a book. And I really thought it would be for my kids and for my grandkids. I never thought it would blow up and become like a bestseller. Um, I just wanted to help them like as my daughters are growing up and they're deciding, do I want to start a family? Do I want to have a career? like which way do I want to go? I just wanted them to know the truth. This is my big thing with feminism is that uh if this is a movement for women, if it's for me, if it's for my daughters and it's for our benefit, we should know the truth about it. We should know the truth about how it came about, who pushed it to the forefront, who paid to push it to the forefront, why there needed to be a century and billions of dollars worth of propaganda, why the CIA had to get involved to create things like Ms. Magazine to push this stuff on the culture. Like, we should know that as women, if we if we are the benefactors of feminism, you could at least tell us the truth. I think it's very patronizing to say, "Ah, don't look at that. Don't look at that. Just look just you don't want to be stuck in a bad marriage, do you?" You know, don't you want your own money?
>> So, that's why I wrote the book, cuz I I just feel like women deserve the truth about it.
>> Rich, when most people think about how feminism actually started, they maybe think of early 1900s, women marching, figures like Susan B. Anthony, the suffragettes. Uh but your book says feminism started thousands of years earlier.
>> Yeah. >> So where does the real story of feminism actually start >> at the beginning of humanity? Of course I'm a Christian, so I'm going to look at things through my Christian lens. But even if you're not, let's say you're secularist, you don't care about the religious part. Clearly nature has a hierarchy. Men are physically stronger, physically bigger um than women are. And that's why through all of history until technology made it possible to have feminism. Like if you're wondering why did we never have this feminism stuff? Why didn't it take over until the last 150 years? It's because we needed an industrial revolution and then a technological revolution to create a world where women could be equal. Meaning uh women can go out and and earn a living just like a man. They can drive on roads that were built by men in a car that was built by men and is maintained by men to an office building that men built with an electrical power structure and uh telecommunications that are all built and maintained by men. And they can sit at a computer and have a job and say I'm equal with men and I'm the same as men. 230 years ago there was no such thing. If you were on a farmstead working alongside your husband, sure you worked. You got up and you took care of the children. You milked the cows. You turned the butter. You did all of the, you know, domestic agricultural stuff, but you knew that you couldn't, you know, uh, take giant steel beams and move them like your husband and his friends could. You knew that the barn raising was done by the men because that stuff's heavy and you have to be big and strong in order to move, you know, big heavy things and do heavy dangerous work. So there wasn't this idea that like men and women are inherently equal. And when I say equal, I don't mean in value in the eyes of God or in value in the eyes of people even. It's more just that it's very clear that there's a biologically based difference between men and women. And each have their own responsibilities, their own burdens, their own roles to play because we are not interchangeable widgets. Now that we have technology, everybody thinks we are.
So I went back. I thought it was going to start around Mary Wollstonecraft and then as I went further back I realized there were women like Christine de Pizan who was a writer for the French court in the 1500s. She was actually Italian but um became a prominent writer and worked for the French aristocracy and made her own money became published um and she even wrote a lot about you know why why she thought we should push women to a higher station in society and things like that and I thought oh that's interesting you know that's a little earlier and I kept kind of working my way back and you realize that from the beginning of humanity whether you think that's in the Garden of Eden or whether you think that's in ancient Mesopotamia There's always been this hierarchical balance of men having a monopoly on physical force and women having a monopoly on reproduction and who gets to reproduce. What do I mean by that? If you look at genetic studies, each of us alive today has twice as many female ancestors as we have male ancestors. And the reason for that is because as a woman, all you need to do to, you know, reproduce and make a genetic copy of yourself is be fertile. And some man is going to come along and he's going to fertilize you, [laughter] right? That's really all you have to do. For men, it's never been like that. You've always had to either be able to, you know, compete and dominate with other men by force or by having more resources or more wealth or status than them. you had to have, you know, either had to take a war bride or get permission from a woman's father um in ancient times in order to reproduce. And a lot of men died before they got the chance to do that, whether in war or by doing dangerous work um things like that. So, there's always been this kind of uh hierarchy. And what feminism did was it said, "We're going to try to equalize that. We're going to try to equalize the hierarchy. We're going to try to boost women up to where we think men are. But the problem there is that along with the power that men had came a lot of responsibility and difficult duties that women either don't want to fulfill or physically cannot fulfill. Women have a duty that men cannot physically fulfill which would be childbirth. So from my view looking at history, there was a balance in place and what feminism did was threw the balance off completely and shifted a whole bunch of power to women without the corresponding duties and responsibilities and accountability that would go with that. So if you look at ancient times, you had um women's only agency was things like temple prostitution, being uh you know, a priestess. You know, we're talking about pagan times, like ancient pagan Rome maybe would be a good example of women can either marry into wealth, power, and status, they can be born into it, or they can do something like become a a temple priestess or a temple prostitute or something like that. And that's I guess a form of like sexual liberation in ancient times.
>> And when Christianity came along, it kind of did away with that and elevated women to more of a holding them in a virtuous position. Um not treating them as, you know, sacrificial lambs. We're not, you know, sacrificing virgins to angry gods or anything like that. We're saying no, women should be protected and provided for. They should be venerated as mothers and and good wives and they should be chaste and pure to the extent that they can. And then men's job is to protect and provide. And it it kind of it changed the social order of men and women from what the pagan order was depending on where you were. So, the pagans uh what were like some of the goddesses they were worshiping and what were those societies that like were kind of pushing that feminist uh flip in gender dynamics.
>> Yeah. So the my book opens going over some of this and how like a lot of the ancient goddesses were um you they usually were goddesses of fertility um but they were also usually kind of vengeful and angry a lot of them were which is why they've become popular again in feminist circles especially in the 1970s there was a goddess worship revival um and that's kind of going on now like if you go on TikTok there's plenty of girls talking about like Lilith or Anana or some of these revitalized ancient uh goddesses that they they worship and whether they worship them truly in a spiritual sense or whether they're kind of worshiping them in like a not so much a literal sense but just saying I like this idea this is like an avatar of the the strong independent woman who gets her revenge on men for trying to subjugate her.
>> Um >> it depends right at the end of the day.
>> Yes. At the end of the day it's it's basically the same thing. Interestingly, a great a great example of this is the first cover of Ms. Magazine. Now, Ms. Magazine was the first feminist publication that was like really popular in America. There were feminist publications going back to the early 1800s, but this was like a mainstream magazine that was really pushed and became really popular in the '70s. It was founded by Gloria Steinem and Clay Felker of the CIA. So, it had CIA funding and CIA backing, which is people probably think that's super weird. Why would the CIA be interested in feminism? And it was part of a Cold War project called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. And this was an effort by the CIA to to compare and contrast and distinguish us from Soviet Russia and say, "We have this liberal freedom. They are, you know, these these old-timey oppressors, these communists." Um, and it was kind of like an anti-communist propaganda to push the women's liberation thing, like, hey, in the West you can be free as a woman and you can't have that under the communists, which my second book is actually coming out later this year is about that, about how actually the communists were the first ones to really push the feminism in in government and and make it legal under the Bolshevik regime. But that aside, um, the first copy of Ms. Magazine on the cover, now remember, you're trying to market this magazine to suburban housewives in America in 1973. And they picked the Hindu goddess Kali. And she is a blue-skinned kind of terrifying looking Hindu goddess who Now I'm not saying this from the from the Hindu perspective because I'll get Hindus that get upset with me and they'll message me, you're wrong about No, I'm saying the feminists from the feminist perspective in the '70s, they saw her as a vengeful goddess who only accepts the sacrifice of men. Um she, you know, eats the blood of men on the battlefield. She is the dark mother. Um, and so there's this picture of her with six arms and in her six arms she's holding a baby and an iron and a frying pan and there's even like a baby in her womb and on the cover it's you know one of the issues it's talking about abortion is one of the article topics. So there's like this baby in the womb of the and she's dressed in like an apron. And so very bizarre choice, but what they were trying to get across is like we're at this tipping point where we're going to choose whether we're going to be these domestic slaves who are just baby factories. You know, all we our our life is not, you know, up to us. We're subjugated by men and we're just forced to give birth and be chained to the stove until we die. um or we're going to become vengeful like goddesses who get our revenge against the evil oppressive patriarchy. So I'm not saying Hindus believe this. I'm saying feminists use these angry vengeful goddess archetypes to as like a cultural weapon to push the propaganda. But if you do go back to ancient times that that was often the role of a goddess figure was fertility um domination of men or revenge of men against men through sex. So if you look at like even like a lot of the ancient Roman gods, a lot of the ancient Greek gods and you read the mythology, there's often this uh the gods are always fighting, right? They're always at war. Pagan gods are always fighting with each other, kind of like humans. And the way that the female goddesses usually get back at the men is by, you know, eating their offspring, um, uh, seducing them, using their sexuality as a weapon to get revenge, things like that. And so the feminist movement loves that. They, they love reading that mythology and turning it into like a feminist um, cry to battle.
>> Yeah. Your book spends a lot of time on three ancient goddesses, specifically Lilith, Kie, and Anana. >> Can you tell me a little bit about Lilith and Anana, and kind of like how they shaped uh modern feminism?
>> Yeah, so Anana was one of the most important goddesses in ancient Sumeria. She was kind of one of the one of the top tier ones. There was a lot of temples built to her. one of the oldest um like goddess stories that we have, one of the oldest archetypes that we have. And something you'll find with her that's pretty common across all of these goddess archetypes is that they're they're a mother. So, they give life, they give birth, they're usually also um fertility goddesses. Um they use sexuality, like I said, as a weapon or um as a way to get power or control. Uh because they don't have the monopoly on force. the big male gods are stronger, you know, physically or whatever whatever it might be. And uh in ancient times when you were worshiping one of these goddesses like Anana, you would usually uh go to a temple prostitute and there was this sense that female sexuality was like a way to connect with the divine. Um, and so prostitutes were often venerated, at least temple prostitutes, maybe not street prostitutes, but temple prostitutes were venerated. They were um held in high regard. So, it's like an early example of female sexuality being used as this this way to elevate women because it's it can be a weapon. Sexuality for women and seduction and fertility can is a power that we have that men don't have. We're the people who basically get to decide who gets to to reproduce. Like I said, unless you're grabbing war brides or something, but that wasn't most men through most of history.
>> Um, and Lilith was >> I just want to clarify really quick. So, temple prostitutes, uh, >> I kind of have a guess of what that is. Like, is that a priestly woman that would participate in like a fertility ritual with men for some kind of like explain what that is?
>> Yeah, it kind of depended on the the culture and the time because it it changed and it differed a little bit, but it was a religious sacrament of sorts in the pagan world to you'd go to the temple, you would meet with the temple prostitute, you would, you know, have some kind of relations with her and that would be a way to commune with the divine or a way to give an offering. Um, and that's something that has continued like the modern occult rituals are kind of based on that. They kind of take those ideas and and use them in occult rituals. Um because that's all the occult is really is like a secretive type of esoteric religious practice that takes a lot of the ancient stuff like hermeticism um paganism and turns it into like ritual magic.
>> You've written that one of the earliest modern movements to bring these ancient goddesses back was a religion called is it called Wicca or witchcraft? Technically, >> uh Wicca is a type of witchcraft. So, it's like a subset.
>> Got it. Yeah. So, just maybe a theology known as witchcraft or religion known as witchcraft. How do you define witchcraft and how is it connected to feminism?
>> Uh, witchcraft. I took a whole chapter on it to explain kind of the history of it and how it's always been um a way for women who felt like they were outside of the competitive female hierarchy to have power, to get revenge, to think of the archetype of the witch, like the wicked witch with the big nose. She's always ugly and haggard. Um, she's always dressed in black wearing the pointy hat. She lives in a cabin off on the edge of the woods away from the town. Um, she scares the children. She kidnaps and eats the children. Um, and she gives, you know, like, think of Snow White, think of Sleeping Beauty, like all of the fairy tales that we have. The witch is always trying to hurt the young beautiful maiden, trying to poison her with an apple, trying to steal her youth, steal her beauty. These archetypes exist for a reason. There's always been some women who don't compete well within the hierarchy for mates. So, if you're a pretty girl that men like, you're charming, um, and men want to marry you, the system works great for you. But there's always this minority of women who, for whatever reason, whether they're physically repulsive to men, maybe they are their personality type is very combative and and unappealing for men, and they're kind of shunned by the patriarchy. It's like, ugh, go over there. We don't we don't really want anything to do with you. We want the beautiful young, nice girls that are going to make good wives. And throughout history, and this is not just according to me, there's a witch who teaches about this at New York University that I um reference in my book. This is from her perspective as a second generation witch herself. that those women have always gone outside of society and practiced witchcraft as a way to uh have some power, have some influence, get some revenge, um take back what they feel they deserve, that they're not getting that the rest of society is benefiting from. So they this whole uh thing where men choose women and women choose men and they get married and they have a nuclear family. If that doesn't work for them, witchcraft is very appealing because it's always very anti-patriarchy. It's also very anti-Christian. It's it's a way to kind of fight back as a woman who the system doesn't work for. So that's why we have the archetype of the witch. But in actual history, witches um everybody's heard of like the witch trials and um you know, burning witches at the stake and things like this. And uh in the middle of the 20th century, there was this big effort to make the witch into a sympathetic character starting with L. Frank Baum in the Wizard of Oz. Now L. Frank Baum's mother-in-law was named Matilda Joslyn Gage. She was one of the prominent suffragettes, a good friend of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the two big figures of women's suffrage. and L. Frank Baum lived with her for a long time and and was very heavily influenced by her and he wrote the character of Glinda the Good Witch after her. Now, Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote a book called Woman, Church and State. And this was her explaining how she felt that Christianity and the state came together to oppress women and that Christianity was the root from which women were oppressed and that if we want to have real feminism and we want real women's liberation, we've got to get rid of Christianity. So when L. Frank Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz, this was a big influence on him and that was the first time that we've seen somebody try to make a witch into the good guy basically. But then that kind of continued um post World War II when the culture wars began ramping up again. We saw stuff like uh the old TV show Bewitched um where it's a witch named Samantha who's cute and adorable and she wiggles her nose and casts spells and she marries her husband and her husband's always telling her not to use her witchcraft. You be a normal woman. You don't use your witchcraft. You be a good wife. Um and and that was another kind of cultural attempt to say it's if you read between the lines, it's saying, "Hey, women in their powers and influence, whether it's their sexuality or their spirituality, um why should that be oppressed by bad men?" You know, maybe the witch is really the good guy. You know, maybe she's the rebellious woman that's not going to let men push her around and tell her what to do. Um, and then now in the last few years, we have Wicked, which is this other big cultural phenomenon with Ariana Grande. And, uh, again, we see a witch character who is really the good person, but is being painted as bad when when it's unwarranted, and she's actually this sympathetic character who's fighting for what's right, and she's just misunderstood. So, throughout all of history, it was never that way. witches were persecuted and people think that's because they were opinionated women. That's not the reason at all. If you actually go back and read some of uh the things that were being written around the time of the prominent witchcraft trials, a lot of the people who were uh not saying that there weren't people who were wrongly accused or wrongly tortured or anything like that. There certainly were. But a lot of the people who were persecuted by the church for doing witchcraft were abortion providers. So witches had herbal remedies and um knew how to do like kind of primitive surgical abortions and things like that. They had tinctures. They had um herbal remedies to induce abortions. Um and they often did do ritual magic. That's where the broomstick comes from. It's a little graphic, but in my book I explain where the idea of the witch riding the broom comes from. So, in medieval times, uh there was a practice in witchcraft of using um like it wasn't LSD because that hadn't been synthesized yet, but there were like natural things like ayahuasca or other type of psychedelic drugs, hallucinogenic drugs. Um mushrooms would probably be the primary one. They would make like a paste or a like a lubricant out of that and put it on a broomstick and use it in a sex ritual. So you are uh sex is always the most powerful uh way to do ritual magic because the emotions are so heightened and the belief is that you can kind of access the divine through climax through this heightened emotional state. So that's why almost every famous occultist you've heard of like maybe somebody like Aleister Crowley, they're always doing ritual sex magic. It's because it's supposed to be the most powerful type of magic that's goes back to the temple prostitution that goes back to ancient times. So, witches would indeed use um hallucinogenic tinctures as like a lubricant and then use something like a broomstick and do ritual magic. And that's where the idea of flying on a broomstick >> came from. And so when you see witches flying on broomsticks, that's like a a subtle way of saying what they were doing. Um same thing with the pointy hat. The pointy hat actually comes from Kabbalah. A lot of medieval witches practiced Kabbalah and there was like a black triangular kind of pointy hat that people would wear back then when they practiced Kabbalah and that's where the witch's hat comes from.
>> So, >> but where does that come from originally? Like the pointy hat, like what does that symbolize?
>> I'm not sure what it symbolizes. There's a lot You always see threes a lot. Anything in threes, even in Christianity, we have the Trinity. Three is like kind of a sacred sacred geometry thing.
>> Got it. It's a triangle.
>> Yes, it's a triangle.
>> That makes sense. So from ancient Kabbalah is where the the witchcraft hat kind of originates from. And again, this is not Rachel telling you as a Christian. This is me listening to lectures and reading books written by witches, modern-day witches, who are telling you proudly what their heritage is. So if you think I'm wrong, you got to go take it up with them. That's what they told me. So, and a lot of witches were actually prosecuted for practicing witchcraft, doing spellcraft. Another really common reason a witch might have been persecuted or burned at the stake was they were the uh primary purveyors of poison. So if you wanted to poison someone, you went to a witch to get a poison so that you could poison someone. Often men. So it's a really interesting historical fact that women have always used poison as like a primary means of unaliving someone. um whereas men tend to use more brute force uh that sort of thing. And as we developed testing to identify if somebody was murdered with poison, poisonings went down. [laughter] Um it's kind of interesting, but that was like a a primary method. If you wanted an abortion, if you wanted to kill someone by poison, if you wanted to do ritual sex magic, you went to the witch >> who lived outside of town.
>> So if if you had to break down like the real reason the witch trials happened, the burnings, like would you say that all the women accused were accused of those two specific things or was the Catholic Church uh and the aristocracy like more mad at the actual magic they were doing? Like what were they upset with?
>> Um I I think it was both.
>> Okay.
>> It was just that those were the things that were easier to prove. Um, and again, I'm not saying there were not periods where maybe the Roman Catholic Church or the Puritans in New England didn't get hysterical and start persecuting people who were wrongly accused. I'm sure that that happened. But another thing that happened during the witch trials that we never talk about is that at least 20% of the people who were burned or drowned as witches were men. So, [snorts] plenty of men got accused of witchcraft as well. And I think it was a time where you do have some political uh things, complicating matters. The church is trying to, you know, keep power and maintain power. That's true. But it was the belief at the time that if you had somebody who was doing these things that maybe the wrath of God and his judgment is going to come upon you and your people. If there's somebody in the town performing abortions on a regular basis, we need to get rid of that. Um, so from the perspective of the church, these were things that, you know, were illegal. They were crimes and they needed to be punished. Um, but yes, if you want to if you want to think of it this way, they had legitimate reasons for wanting to persecute witches. And then you know at times it probably did get out of control and there were probably a lot of people who were falsely accused and it did become a vehicle for people to make false accusations. But the idea that there was no basis for it whatsoever and this common trope that you hear now that oh the witch trials were just awful patriarchal men who didn't like women who had their own brains and their own thoughts and so if you tried to speak up about an injustice they would burn you as a witch. That's historically not accurate at all.
>> Yeah. In reality, they were providing abortions and poisoning people and people were concerned that that would spread.
>> Yes. Exactly.
>> Yeah. You never hear that. So that would make more sense. I I was always confused >> watching [laughter] like the Salem Witch trial like plays or like movies about that. I was like, what was going on here? Like were people just crazy? But >> I mean it seems like part of the history was left out.
>> Yes. A big part a big important piece was left out. And that happens all the time. That's I'm a super huge history buff. I always have been. And it's because almost any time that you have a super dominant historical narrative, if you go back and look, there are things that will challenge it. There are counternarratives and um it's really tough to find exactly what the truth is because it kind of does depend on who's telling it. And they say that uh you know, history is written by the victors and it's rewritten all the time. And I'm sure we'll talk about that with feminism and you know we can talk about college textbooks and what they've done there. But yeah, if you go if you go back you can almost always find a counternarrative and it takes some sifting through and some thinking about what was going on at the time looking at the people involved um and who stood to gain from what to kind of form
A picture of what's maybe more accurate. But there's a lot of history that we'll never fully know exactly what happened.
As we get later into feminist history, I'd say from the 1700s on, because there was no telecommunications yet until, you know, the early 20th century, we have extensive written documentation. So I do feel really really confident that everything from you know 1700 to the mid 20th century we really know what was going on because the primary way that suffragists and feminists communicated their message, talked to each other. Um, that's all written. They wrote each other letters, they wrote pamphlets, they um delivered speeches, they debated publicly.
Actually, a lot of people think women were never allowed to speak. They weren't. Rachel, you're on a podcast right now speaking, and you couldn't do that if it wasn't for feminism. That's not true at all. Um, women were in the 1700s publicly speaking and giving speeches and um, you know, making a living, touring, talking about these things.
I do want to connect the Protestant Reformation and how it paved the way for the rise of feminism. But first, uh, I'm not sure if you've seen this stat. It was in 2002, only 30% of American women identified as feminist, and by 2020, that has doubled. And among Gen Z women, 68% of them identify as feminist.
And at the same time, the fastest growing religion among Gen Z women in America isn't Christianity, and it isn't atheism. It's witchcraft.
Yes. Do you think the rise of feminism and the rise of witchcraft is a coincidence, or do you think they're the same movement?
I definitely think they're the same movement. So that's why in the book, I take a lot of time to show the historical thread from ancient times through medieval times all the way till now. Um, and of course, I'm not going to make it a a 5,000-page book where I'm I'm covering every single century of history. I just kind of weave some important moments together through the ages to kind of show there's it started as a spiritual battle. It's still a spiritual battle. Um, and then the politics gets weaved in, of course.
So Susanna Budapest, who is a Czechoslovakian witch, she was uh an immigrant here uh in the 60s. I think she I think she actually came during World War II because she was escaping some of the stuff that was going on in Eastern Europe at the time. She was the first to get witchcraft laws overturned in the United States in California, where she lived, under religious freedom clauses. And she herself, who is still around, she I believe she's still around. She was around during Trump's last term um leading spellcasting rituals against Trump with all of her witches that are on Facebook and TikTok who follow her. Uh, she's a much older lady now, but she's still practicing witchcraft and you know, cursing Donald Trump with her.
Like a 13,000-member Facebook group, I believe. Like it was like a lot of people.
It's a lot of people.
And they did it against Brett Kavanaugh, I believe.
Yeah.
Um.
What were they trying to accomplish? Just give him bad luck?
Yes. Okay. To prevent them from coming to power, prevent them from getting, you know, their agenda passed because of course, from their perspective, Donald Trump's going to enslave all the women and Brett Kavanaugh is going to enslave all the it's going to be the Handmaid's Tale, right? That's what they think.
So, um, this woman said that uh, feminism is just the political arm of a spiritual battle. That's according to a witch herself. She says this is a spiritual battle and feminism is just that political arm to help us with the political power aspect that we need to have the freedom to do things like practice witchcraft.
Abortion, that's a big one. When Roe versus Wade was overturned a few years ago and it went back to the states, there were multiple organizations, including Native American organizations, uh, the Satanic Temple, and multiple um, Wiccan and witchcraft covens who contested the the changing of the laws because they said abortion is a ritual sacrament for them and should be protected under religious freedom laws.
So, I'm This is not Rachel. People, you know, off the off the bat when they see me and they hear me start talking, they go, "Oh, she's one of those crazy Christians that thinks everything's the devil." Like, I'm Bobby Boucher's mother and the Waterboy, and I think everything's the devil. No, I'm telling you, they're the ones who tell me witchcraft is a spiritual battle for feminism, for for women's freedom, for revenge against the patriarchy.
You're saying that the church, it's a church of Satan?
Yeah.
Is suing the state of Texas?
Yes, they did. They they contested the change in the abortion laws.
Like the heartbeat bill?
Yes.
Because they see abortion as a ritual sacrifice, so it's necessary to their church.
Yes. Exactly. And if you go on TikTok and you search the hashtag witchtalk, you can find dozens of female creators on TikTok who will show you how to uh make a ritual out of your abortion. They'll show you how to make an altar, how to you use the tissues that are removed from you in a ritual magic spell, um, and ritualize your abortion to give you power, to give you things that you want in life. Like this is people think this is Rachel being crazy. It's really not. There, like you said, witchcraft is the fastest growing religion, especially among Gen Z women in America. And they do mostly identify as feminists. And they do think that from a spiritual perspective, these things are empowering.
So that the reason I have an argument that is original to me when I debate people on abortion, and this will show you that what I'm saying is true and that this is how they actually feel. Because in the '90s, you you probably don't remember because you're very young, but Bill Clinton would say abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Right? That was the progressive stance in the '90s. Now we have switched to "my body, my choice," abortion on demand, you are not allowed to put any restrictions on it, "no uterus, no opinion."
And what what this kind of proves when I when I put forth this argument, it goes like this. Uh I'll ask a woman if she thinks abortion should be legal. She'll say yes. And I say, "All the way up until birth?" And sometimes they'll say yes. Sometimes they'll say, "Well, I would cut it off here. I would cut it off there." And I say, "What about this?" A woman goes in to get an abortion at eight weeks. And the abortion doctor says, "Good news. We have new technology. We have artificial wombs. We've just created artificial wombs that are successful. And you don't have to kill this fetus. You can have it implanted into an artificial womb, and you won't have any legal obligation to it. You won't have any moral obligation to it. It's just going to be a simple laparoscopic procedure. No more risk than an abortion. And uh, you know, the only difference is rather than killing it and removing it, we're just going to remove it alive and let it gestate and and fully grow and be born." I say, "If there was such an option as this available, would you then still be in favor of abortion?" And I have not once had a woman say no. Every single time they say, "I still think she should be able to choose to kill the fetus."
And then I ask why, and they don't really know, and they're hesitant. It's like they know. They know I've kind of caught them in a trap. They know it doesn't sound good to people that they just said that, but really what they're saying is women need power. And one of our greatest powers that we have is to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. That this is like a deeply held ancient power struggle and that women need the power to decide which men get to have babies and which men don't for any reason at any time. So, it kind of it kind of just gives the game away a little bit psychologically that even if they don't mean to phrase it that way or even if they don't mean to put it that way, something deep in their brain is telling them, I need the power to decide who gets to be born. And uh that's like a very very ancient concept that is and it's it is a holy sacrifice type of a thing within witchcraft.