Most of the articles were written with the slightly-too-serious sincerity of a reporter who knows she doesn’t have to explain the joke to her audience. Only The Huffington Post even bothered to ask the question running beneath all of the articles: so are we supposed to take this seriously, or what? The answer it got back from Ben Radford, the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer was a reassuring “mostly not.” Curses, Radford explained, only work in cultures that actually believe in them. A hex or the evil eye might do something in Africa, Asia or Europe but in America a victim simply wouldn’t care. The sentiment behind the mass hex, he went on to add, was understandable and even admirable, but in twenty-first century America it amounted to another form of “slacktivism.”
That might have been the sum of the story — another marginal religious community discovered, gawked at, and dismissed — except for one strange detail. Like Radford, nearly all of the other articles pull back from dismissing witchcraft altogether when it touches on the experience of sexual assault. Most even end by respectfully quoting Hexen about her belief that many of the women participating would cast curses of special power because they themselves had been raped.
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