Are you a Good Witch or a Bad Witch?
The distracting questions of "bad" feminism and Netflix's Kaos
During the first week of classes, folks were asked to watch Roxanne Gay’s TedTalk on Confessions of a Bad Feminist. By Friday afternoon, multiple students asked, “Am I a good feminist or a bad feminist?” Some worried about listening to rap, which is Gay’s example of a moral dilemma in the spectrum of feminist thinking and living—someone interested in equality and as bell hooks would say “the end of sexist oppression” who may not have the “purest” daily behaviors. Gay’s example of listening to degrading music in the car she knows isn’t feminist, or at least doesn’t empower women and perpetuates gender stereotypes seems to be what sticks with students, not the tongue and cheek references to other stereotypes associated with “Feminism” that often lead to separatist practices. It’s tangible. It’s relatable. And it’s a distraction from the real questions.
Last Thursday happened to be the first football game of the season. I haven’t been near a school with an active, let-along top-tier, football team in almost 20 years. As class wrapped up, I talked with one student about Diane di Prima’s quote from “Rant”
“The war that matters is the war against the imagination, all other wars and subsumed in it.”
Did she mean that the oppressor’s imagination dominated the oppressed? Did she mean the oppressed became projections of the oppressor’s imaginations? Or did she simply mean that if the imagination believes war is the answer to any conflict that is our real problem? We thought about it for a moment as throngs of young people screamed their way towards the stadium. In the morning, an all-university email detailed the description of a suspect wanted for sexual assault that occurred during the game.
The question isn’t “Does listening to degrading music make me a bad feminist,” it’s “How do I participate in a society that condones sexual violence?”
This weekend, I watched the new Netflix series Kaos, in which Jeff Goldblum plays a paranoid, violent, and unloveable Zeus among his family of slightly saner yet still zany Greek gods. The show follows the premise of how one does or doesn’t enact their birth prophecy written by the Fates. In particular madness, Zeus finds himself alarmed when the Fates tell him that if you believe in the prophecy, then you will enact it. There is some free will involved in fate. We later learn that the interpretation of a prophecy, or rather the misinterpretation is perhaps a shared hubris of gods and men.
In one of the first scenes, Cassandra gives Eurydice a warning—she will leave her husband tonight. We soon learn that Eurydice leaves everyone that night, getting trapped in the Underworld thanks to Orpheus, who confuses love with co-dependence. It is there she learns her koan of a prophecy is not her’s alone.
A line appears. The order wanes. A family falls. Chaos reigns.
Per the show’s title, viewers soon find that how we interpret these lines matters. To Zeus, the appearance of a wrinkle brings so much fear of his own demise he believes complete control over Earth and Olympus is the only antidote to chaos. He becomes irrational, and violent, unwilling to compromise with the other gods. He denounces empathy, and demands more Cretans die for his own survival and immortality, and calls Prometheus his “best friend.” When Prometheus asks how someone could torture their best friend, the prophecy unravels; the family begins to fall.
It turns out, that like di Prima’s poem, the lines contain multiple meanings and that each character’s role in the prophecy moves the collective towards chaos that upends the hierarchy of Zeus’s making (which several characters point out is Zeus behaving as his father Chronos did.)
In one particularly compelling moment, a voiceover reads, “Hades curse is that he does what Zeus tells him.” It’s in that moment the understanding of power structures in Olympus shifts—it’s clear Zeus’ demands have been headed all along, even if his siblings disagree. This also shifts how one views the marriage between Persephone and Hades. It changes what it means to oversee the dead.
A new perspective broadens the imagination for new potential.
The question is no longer—does listening to rap make me a good or bad feminist—it is: what kind of society focuses on trying to parse out the “goodness” of their identity rather focus on how to craft a society that doesn’t practice sexual assault at college football games?
I think a key to the fall of the family in Kaos is that while individuals receive a prophecy, it is collective action, each individual’s choice to move against the path of least resistance, that creates a ripple toward social change. The fall of Zeus is not his folly, it’s each player’s action, their choice to go against the system which happens to be a house of mirrors, a pool of blood, and a minotaur who isn’t a minotaur at all.
In the Underworld, Eurydice falls in love. This is quite the shift from her usual storyline. After she and Orpheus climb their way out of the dumpster that leads to the Underworld, she demands he look at her. While I tend to be deeply invested in the “true” story cycle of a myth or fairytale, this shift compelled me—not just because it gave Eurydice (and in a sense Orpheus) agency and ending, it opened up the imagination for new possibility. It allowed them both to live as elements of a greater storyline. It created a portal for alternative narratives that may lead to the fracture of hierarchy. It may lead to new definitions of love.
The question is not—does listening to misogynistic rap make me a bad feminist—it is: what does listening to misogynistic rap do to my imagination? The imagination, much like the cat who paws my face at 6 am every day, demands food. Perhaps what and how we feed the imagination can create the ripple that topples the hierarchy and leaves the balance of the gods (and humans) restored.