Hags: 'eloquent, clever and devastating' The Times

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Though they behaved with some semblance of civility, coven hags still wanted to increase their personal power, and so the third coven mate served to deal with disputes when the other two inevitably started arguing. Three was the typical number of members in hag covens, [1] most commonly with each hag being a different type, [4] but any grouping of hags larger than that, the maximum in a single coven being thirteen, usually ended in catastrophe. [1] [8] Motive [ ]

Rosheen was born to a Trinidadian father and an Irish mother in Ireland's small County, Kerry. She'd never met her father and when she was all grown up, she leaves the town she grew up in to move to the big city and finds work on a secluded farm where the owner doesn't pay her much and got her to work tirelessly. When she demands her share of the money, she experiences something stranger, stranger than fiction as they say. The current biological consensus to explain the menopause is the “grandmother hypothesis”: at a certain point in a woman’s life cycle, the expected evolutionary benefit to her is greater if she focuses on supporting whatever offspring she already has, rather than attempting to produce any more. In other words, it is because of the significance of women’s contributions in later life that the menopause exists. Nevertheless, says Smith, much research and discussion about menopause has carried an implied question of “why haven’t these bitches died yet?”. A hag's lair, no matter it's form, was an unpleasant, disturbing thing which, like her form and magic, was a representation of herself. [2] [1] This was when they weren't actively twisting Feywild magic to twist their homes to better fit their macabre tastes and dark senses of humor. [8] Normally there was some element of corruption and death; a dead tree, a cave resembling a skull or possibly an actual giant skull. At other times they were more obviously manufactured, resembling taverns, ruined towers, mausoleums, giant coffins, and even gingerbread houses. [2] [1] A lot of what this book talks about rang true to me - the deep, unexamined misogny in feminist and left-learning spaces, the willingness of younger feminists to throw out the work of second-wave feminists to avoid being cast as 'problematic', the lazy way 'karen' has been co-opted to mean 'women', the downplaying of sex-based oppression in favour of a more confusing, perpetrator-less idea of patriarchy. The patron power of the hags was Cegilune, a bitter moon goddess who herself held a grudge against many divine beings and the countless mortal races who followed them. From the bottom of the multiverse, a pit in the Gray Waste known as Hag's End, she brewed new abominations and used profane magic in her spiteful schemes. Though she did have devotees who praised her virtues while cursing and sacrificing her enemies at gristly shrines, hags for the most part had no love for their own goddess. Most hags feared her for her cupidity, rightly believing that she might demand information, magic, and other spoils they'd rather keep for themselves, but they dared not disobey her. [7] [6]First of all, it wasn't what I expected. The title is obviously a piss take of Owen Jones's "Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class", which was the last worthwhile thing Owen Jones did, before becoming the chief scourge of middle aged women everywhere. As such, I expected there to be a lot more personal axe-grinding against individuals, but she is too classy for that. I also expected more examinations of individual instances in which women had been named and shamed in social media for some imaginary Karenage. I think she was probably wise not to go down that route either, because it could easily have got into Douglas Murray territory and nobody wants that. But maybe a few more examples might have helped illustrate the wider point.

But eventually Dutchman-Smith's conservative, transphobic rhetoric became all too clear and I couldn't persist. The other type were brutes, mercenaries under a hag's employ with free will that ran errands, roughed up assigned targets, patrolled unimportant areas and otherwise attended to laborious tasks beneath the hag's personal attention. [2] [13] Though hags were known to employ ogres, the term brute was generally misleading since hags preferred employees willing and capable of cunning cruelty as opposed to strong but stupid bumblers. These could be other kinds of evil giants, lycanthropes, dark fey, sneaky creatures like bugbears, kenku, and doppelgangers, or other strange monsters like ettercaps, gargoyles, [2] [4] and aberrations. [13] Ashleigh and George move to George's parents' farm, Sour hall farm after she inherits the farm. They start working on renovating and also how to make a profit from selling cheese and milk and the likes. It is rumored that the farm is haunted by The Boggart. Ashleigh starts to see some strange things that are somehow related to her past. Ed Bonny (1997). “Pox of the Planes”. In Dave Gross ed. Dragon Annual #2 ( TSR, Inc.) (2)., p. 104. Another claimed method was even more direct, the use of magic to swap their spawn with those of other races while the original child was still in the womb, supposedly killing the mother, asleep at the time of the switch, at birth. This claim seemed more superstition than the others and had never actually been proven, although given hag access to weird magic it was difficult to put anything past the ability of their rotten witchery. [2] [5] [10] The Change [ ]The author describes how the experiences of women around fertility and child bearing is diminished by gender neutral language but I don’t think that is necessarily the case either. I won’t go into this as others have in much better detail. After all, defining experiences such as periods and pregnancy as belonging only to cis women has so far worked not so well in terms of changing the status quo anyways. Green hag : The most duplicitous and hateful hags, green hags used illusions and temptation to lead others to destruction and tragedy. The forest femme fatales sought to poison that which was pure and drag down the civilized world into barbarism. [10] [1] Alana Abbott (November 2011). “Court of Stars: Baba Yaga, Mother of All Witches”. In Steve Winter ed. Dungeon #196 ( Wizards of the Coast) (196)., pp. 1–5. I felt a bit saddened by the chapters talking about fertility that worth as a parent or non parent was not fully explored. This felt like a missed opportunity. As we grow older, there’s often an accumulation of experiences that show us, in many different ways, that it’s a man’s world. Physical and economic infrastructure is built for male bodies and male life cycles; male perspectives and experiences are favoured and treated as the default at every turn.

I write this review cautiously because (cards on the table), my views differ from those of the author on a few topics. My dad once said he didn’t think he should be able to vote in appeal the 8th because he was a man (he did vote the right way) and I feel similarly about reviewing this book in some ways as I don’t think it was written for me. At the end of the ritual, the life essence of all hags in the coven was bound to the eye, allowing all members to see what the eye could see so long as it was on the same plane as them, the eye being able to see in the dark. Superficially, a hag's eye appeared as a semiprecious stone but a truesight revealed its true form as a monstrous, disembodied eye. Hag eyes weren't particularly difficult to destroy, and doing so caused all hag's in the coven great mental anguish as well as temporarily blinding at least one of them for an entire day. Creating a new one first required at least a day for the blinded coven mate to recover and had to be done at least three days after the eye was destroyed, some reports stating they could only make one once per month. [1] [4] [5] [10] Misogyny flourishes in spaces where it can be made to appear virtuous,” writes Smith. And that’s certainly the atmosphere that prevailed during the 17th-century witch-hunting era, when unruly women who gathered together to “gossip” or share subversive views were barbarically gagged with so-called scold’s bridles or, worse, executed for sorcery. Folktales provide commentary on some of our timeless needs, desires and fears. Hag is ample proof of the fact that, in the right hands, the themes of time-honoured stories can still resonate with readers (and listeners) today.It was a common belief of some that there were only five kinds of hags, a misconception. Another unknown fact to many was that hags were able to undergo a metamorphosis so as to change into other subraces of hags. The reasons for why could be anything, some believing that by changing into every type of hag they could become something greater by the end. There were also several ways to gain access to the transformation, some hags simply living long enough to do it through force of will over time, and others using certain resources, perhaps a ritual or coven, to speed the process up. [2] History [ ] The true lifespan of hags was unknown, and if not fully immortal, they were nevertheless long-lived for many races. At minimum they lived for several centuries and at maximum many millennia, with lifespans comparable to dragons. [2] [5] Hags that had grown very old became known as aunties, although they could also achieve that respectable title by adopting or birthing several children, joining a powerful coven or placing themselves directly under an even older hag. The eldest of the hags, as well as the most wise and powerful, were known as "grandmothers" by their sisters, some of which had strength rivaling that of the archfey. [2] Subspecies [ ] Mike Mearls, et al. (November 2016). Volo's Guide to Monsters. Edited by Jeremy Crawford, et al. ( Wizards of the Coast), pp. 52–62, 159–160. ISBN 978-0786966011. Dutchman-Smith points out things that I'm sure I've done like becoming a mother but proclaiming I wouldn't "just be a mother" or "be like those Facebook-posting mothers." I have also thought of my mother's generation of feminists as failures as if my generation would be the one that got it right. She says that every generation of feminists does that and it is needlessly divisive. Feminism may evolve, sure, but if we punch down at the last wave, we are doing more damage than good. Hadn't thought of it that way. So, wisely sidestepping outrage porn, she chooses the higher ground: it's framed in terms of existing feminist rhetoric. "Misogyny" comes up a lot as a worse-sounding synonym for sexism, even though actual misogyny is pretty rare in society.

Given their nature as an all-female race, hags had to find other ways to reproduce beyond the conventional methods. There were many tales of the bizarre means through which hags came into the world; some stories reported that they spawned from animals, like cows with venomous milk or snake eggs kissed by virgins, while other processes were more artificial, like being incubated in the coffins of the unhallowed or being poured out from cauldrons of boiling blood. [8] One of the most widely told tales of hag reproduction had to be that of the changeling. [7] [10] Changeling [ ] Many of the arguments about how ageism impacts older women explored in this book are societal, not generational. Discussions of the impact of beauty standards and attempts for medicine to recognise that female bodies may experience illness differently are mainstays of feminist discussion. Smith doesn't say anything new (apart from framing this a generational issue). To discount older women is, if you’re female, to write off your future self. Yes, we know why you do it. It is born of fear, and societal pressures, and a lot of deep, Freudian stuff to do with motherhood; if you are privileged, it may also have to do with guilt (shout about the Terfs and no one will notice you went to public school). However, our sympathy for you is limited. When you liken feminism to Covid-19 on the grounds that both had “problematic second waves”, you sound very ignorant to us. We wonder where you would be without the Abortion Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the women – your grandmothers among them, I expect – who struggled to make sure their daughters might have all the things they were denied themselves. She is as good on the toxic culture of self-improvement as she is on plastic surgery Yet aside from a few statistics on the comparative earning power of older males and females and the shortage of middle-aged women in the public eye, Smith presents little scientific evidence to support her thesis, favouring instead a series of anecdotal comments gleaned from social media posts or classic texts by feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin and Naomi Wolf, as well as conversations with contemporary women. More recently, the “screaming, destructive witches” of Greenham Common” were decried as “belligerent harpies” but today, argues Smith, the feared coven has moved online in the form of Mumsnet – an internet parenting platform that has been derided both as a forum where silly women talk about prams and school catchment areas, and as a “toxic” cauldron of “TERFdom” (trans-exclusionary feminism).The amount of time that hags spent dormant was said to vary based on the methods used to bring them into the world, but nonetheless ended in something known by hags as "the change", the final transformation into one of their kind. Those born after nine months typically lived until their mid-forties, showing minor predilections up until that pointed towards traits foreshadowing their futures; young annis hags were often dark-skinned, powerful and aggressive, young green hags attractive prima donnas and young sea hags plain and pale with toxic personalities. Once the mid-forties were reached, more obvious physical alterations occurred until the juvenile was reborn as a true hag of the same kind as her mother. [7] [10] The aberrant adolescence of young hags made from devoured children was far swifter, the child only living until their thirteenth birthday before transforming into a near physical clone of their mother. [2] Lifespan [ ] She has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the New Angle Award for East Anglian writing. She was the winner of the Edge Hill award for a collection of short stories and the AM Heath Prize. Some reports claimed that hags, every century or so, would use some manner of kidnapping, disguise, charming, and coercion to convince almost any kind of humanoid male, humans and half-elves seemingly being preferred, to lay with them. [10] [24] After swiftly dealing with that, more often than not killing the male afterwards as an accidental mercy, they would immediately know when they were pregnant and spend nine months in a relatively lethargic state, relying on their allies to protect them although able to fight if needed. The female child produced at the end of this period appeared like a normal member of the father's kind. [10] There is something very off-putting from the tone of the writing too. A very "I'm not like other girls because I dare to..." etc without any self reflection with how that comes across. There's critique of skin care and makeup but it's not really in depth. A lot of skin care is a farce but the epidermis is our largest organ and requires some form of care? Instead of focusing her critique to that of anti-aging BS she just slams skin care as a whole? Her arguments are both narrow but general and shallow? It's wild how terrible this book is when there is so much that you could build decent arguments around. The idea that the person who gave birth to you, breastfed you, dealt with your tantrums and taught you how to use a toilet is a human being with an inner life just as rich as your own is an indignity too much for some people – some men, especially – to bear, the ultimate case of being beaten by a girl. Therefore, women’s link to physical dependency must mean they are purely physical creatures, incapable of interpreting their own experiences – “too stupid to understand their own jokes”, as Smith puts it. The life of the mind belongs to men. Women may be given guest access, as long as they are not yet subsumed into that “bovine” mass of middle-aged mothers.