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Hags: 'eloquent, clever and devastating' The Times

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Waterstones has said “there is no truth” in claims that some of its shops were refusing to sell copies of two books by gender-critical feminists.

Gloomy as all this sounds, Hags offers a spirited and enjoyable reworking of a familiar subject – the devaluing of older women. Mike Mearls, Greg Bilsland and Robert J. Schwalb (June 15, 2010). Monster Manual 3 4th edition. ( Wizards of the Coast), pp. 108–109. ISBN 0786954902. There are certainly large portions of this argument that I understand and fully endorse. It is undeniable that the hag/crone/witch/Karen concepts are often misappropriated in a lazy misogynistic attempt at silencing women and denying female experience. It is undeniable that older women are disproportionately cut out of large sections of the workplace, and society while also being disproportionately impacted by inequalities both financial and violent.If only the book had an index....and these were only in the introduction and beginning of chapter one. As someone “becoming invisible” due to my age, I agree with some of the discussions about beauty standards and fertility. I thought the chapters on sexual violence and rape culture were well considered too and horrifying! I have some teenage memories of the 90s culture that the author discusses and her experiences of them made me reflect on my own experiences too. Completely agree about using Karen as a term to belittle the views of women when we do t have an alternative for equally racist and entitled men.

In the event that a hag was acting friendly, or at the very least ambivalent, it was important to remember that hags ultimately didn't care about the thoughts or desires of anyone but themselves. Like cantankerous grandmothers, hags viewed those younger than themselves with opinionated stubbornness, freely and bluntly saying whatever idea came to mind. These could be lewd jokes or comments at their expense or more threatening asides about various means with which they could be harmed, and by no means were hags hesitant to make good on these statements if made to lose their tempers. [2]

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]

Hags typically dwelt in desolate regions with bleak and oppressive landscapes of all kinds, ranging from dark, thorny forests, gloomy, slogging swamps, bone-strewn glens, misty moors, stormy seacoasts, damp caverns, howling mountains, and biting tundras. [1] [8] Specific types had preferred environments but could be found out of them if traveling, part of a coven with more native hags, or if a long-range plan required a long period of time in an unfamiliar region, the lattermost option being most common for older and more powerful hags. [2] Early on I had my concerns about Dutchman-Smith, but I continued to persist with reading this book. I wanted to enjoy it, or at least find some enlightenment in the text. I'm a white, middle-class woman with a career. I'm a decade off before I plummet into middle-aged territory, but I have a decent idea of what I'll be faced with.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 [ ]

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] Skip Williams, Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook (July 2003). Monster Manual v.3.5. ( Wizards of the Coast), pp. 143–144. ISBN 0-7869-2893-X. Hag-hate, Smith argues, is driven by the female fear of ageing, and young women’s consequent desire to disidentify with the generations that went before them. We want to reassure ourselves that, though we might age, we will never truly be like the older women we see around ourselves today. I am like this; she is like that. When she was young, she surely couldn’t have been as smart and enlightened, as vibrant and alive, as I am today. I will not allow the currency of youth to slip through my fingers, as she so foolishly has done. 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. This is especially possible in an age where, as Smith points out, we tend to see our bodies as customisable meat suits that are meant to reflect our true selves, and “few people think their true self looks like a middle-aged woman”. Around twenty years ago, I remember observing with horror my mother’s elbows; they were dry and wrinkly, like those of most adults, and in contrast to my own perfectly smooth child-limbs. My elbows will never be like that, I thought. My logic, I think, went something like this: I would hate for my elbows to look like that, so how could they, when I would hate it so much? Similarly, we can tell ourselves that we couldn’t bear to be seen as ugly, stupid and irrelevant, and so we surely won’t be. By extension, then, if older women are seen that way, then it must be that they can bear it, perhaps because it is an accurate assessment.Then, at a certain age, not only have you learned that the game is rigged, but you can’t play any more in any case. You’re “cast out from the patriarchal meat market”. It makes sense that women in this position have different insights than their younger counterparts. And they are also less hesitant to share them: people care less what others think of them when whatever approval they once stood to lose has dwindled. Differences in the feminist politics typical of older and younger women (such as views on pornography, or transgender issues) should be understood in these terms, says Smith, not the convenient assumption that older generations are just incorrigibly narrow-minded. 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 wrote a long essay about my thoughts on this but goodreads (predictably) ate it so I'm just going to summarise: Annis : The most physically powerful and feared of the hags, annis hags were ferocious savages with nails and teeth like iron. They were egotistical brutes who saw strength as virtue and appealed to simple-minded beings like children or primitives. [7] [2]

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