Member-only story
Magical Thinking for Girls
Science doesn’t give you power unless you already have it
Once upon a time, there was a boy.
We start with the boy because these stories always start with a boy. They start with a boy, and they end with a girl. She is always a victim in these kinds of stories, whether of happiness or unhappiness, violence or kindness, it doesn’t much matter. Sometimes, the girl is rescued, and sometimes, she is not.
So once upon a time, there was a boy. He liked, or didn’t like a girl, and so he would pinch her, and punch her, and throw things at her on the school bus. And every day, he came up with a new, ugly name for the girl. Every day he set the name in motion like spell; he let it bounce off the lockers in the halls until every unkind student picked it up and put it in their mouth. The boy was, in short, a bully, and the girl was unhappy. She told her parents, her teachers, her principal, but everywhere the response was the same: boys will be boys. So the girl decided that she didn’t like this story. She wanted to be in her own story, and so she decided to write it, with help from magic, with help from the stars.
Another way of telling it: When I was twelve years old, I was the girl, and I decided to make my own fate.
There is a theory of magical thinking that men in particular really dig: the notion that as we humans grew more advanced, learned more about the world around us, got more science-y — we slowly gave up things like astrology, alchemy, divination. That we abandoned the notion of magic as the world began to make sense to us without it, as we learned to control the world around us.
A theory I like better: the people who abandoned magical thinking were the ones who controlled the world, who took and kept the power in the world. They were the colonizers, the invaders, and they were mostly white men. The Enlightenment has always belonged to white men. Just because women, just because people of color, just because genderqueer people learned science, it didn’t stop them from needing magic. Because science doesn’t give you power unless you already have it. Knowing about how a hand moves doesn’t stop it from covering your mouth.
