Antifeminist metaphors.
The propaganda discussed in the previous chapter has made "satanism" synonymous with evil, even among unchurched Americans. The gory details of satanic abuse narratives reinforce that connotation, making anything called "satanism" seem automatically, in itself, criminal and evil. The narratives then unconsciously associate difference with that automatic evil in two ways. First, they symbolically contrast stereotyped portrayals of the people imagined to be satanists with the imagined victims. The next chapter discusses the narratives' comparison of stereotyped evil single mothers to their stereotyped innocent nurturing children. Second, narratives of satanic abuse are based on a common chimerical legend, which, aside from motifs of sacrificial cannibalism, contains metaphors that equate or attribute feminism, for example, to satanists.
This chapter looks at antifeminist metaphors in the satanic abuse fable, using examples from the currently unpublished Satan's Child, a purported autobiography by Laura Buchanan. Buchanan's is the most recent satanic abuse narrative, and its antifeminist metaphors are typical, if more blatant. As is usual and useful with autobiographies, I distinguish between the author Buchanan and the person she presents herself as, Laura. (3) Buchanan thinks that because satanists worship the Christian devil, "traditional values are reversed" for them (43). For a Pentacostalist like herself (Buchanan interview), those traditional values are "traditional family values," actually threatened by feminism, but in Buchanan's narrative besieged by satanists.
Abortion.
A central aspect of Western feminism has been reproductive freedom. Contraception and birth control can free women from full time, lifelong childrearing, allowing them to choose wage work, education, and political activism. However, traditional patriarchal families become less necessary if women are no longer completely and permanently occupied with raising children. Since opposition to reproductive freedom has become centered on discourses of abortion, it is no surprise that narratives of satanic abuse use unifying metaphors of abortion and infanticide.
In Buchanan, the sacrificial altar is never dry, as daughters of satanists are "repeatedly impregnated and aborted soon thereafter," thus providing the cult with "several fetuses each year." (4) For a live infant sacrifice, "teenage girls impregnated in the month of January are capable of concealing a pregnancy well into June. Hidden then at home for the summer break, a full term baby may be produced for the cult [sic]" (34). Every few pages, we are treated to another torture scene where Laura's satanic parents kill another child or infant. Satanists are clearly "anti-life." In addition, Buchanan literalizes "pro-life" metaphors of abortion and attributes them to satanists. For example, a common anti-abortion propaganda poster is an image of bloody third trimester fetuses piled in a garbage can. Buchanan echoes the poster in her claim that satanists chop up the remains of their human sacrifices, bag them, and leave them for the garbage truck (47).
Finally, Buchanan metaphorically equates the children Laura supposedly bears for sacrifice with the abortion Laura later has at the insistence of her second husband. Like a horror writer who only knows one frightening thing, Buchanan has Laura become "grotesquely familiar" with the feeling of satanists scraping "small gray fetus[es]" and the occasional live infant out of her (66-67). However, Laura is amnesic to these familiar tortures when "ripping pains tore at my womb" during the abortion and her "composure disintegrated" to the point that she cut her wrists on getting home from the clinic (99-100). Buchanan obviously intends us to infer a relationship between Laura's repressed memories and her irrational panic. She also unconsciously and metaphorically equates abortion with satanic sacrifice. (5)
Working women.
As discussed in the following chapter, most satanic abuse narratives implicitly contrast the child murdering satanic parents of the victim with the child nurturing victim's family. For example, through Laura's horror when the satanists abuse her own innocent children (136-38), Buchanan implies that only satanists abuse children, never born-again Christians like herself. This implication appears in Buchanan's equation of working women or lesbians with satanists.
Economically, feminism has emancipated middle class women from financial dependence on the traditional patriarchal family. Child care centers make that emancipation possible, and can themselves partially free children from dependence on their parents. The traditional family becomes less necessary when women have wage work and children can survive without constant parental care. Not coincidentally, Buchanan thinks Satanists working in day care centers torture and abuse the children there en masse, and that this day care abuse is the work of "an organized satanic network" (194). Other satanic believers claim that satanists "run rampant in the day care industry" (Monarch Resources leaflet). (6)
Children of working women who cannot afford day care are supposedly even less safe from satanists. Buchanan asserts that "many" children "who are abducted each year" are "used as sacrificial offerings in satanic ceremonies all over the country." These children from "poor urban areas" are so easily stolen because they are "left alone to play" (35), implying that they would have been safe if their mothers had been at home watching out for them full-time. (7) Satanists are everywhere: not even children of working Christian women, who Buchanan implies never abuse their children, are secure. Child care isn't safe, and according to Lauren Stratford, giving a child up for adoption isn't safe: Stratford thinks many adoption advertisers and caseworkers are satanists (95). The only children not in danger seem to be those of Christian housewives married to Christian husbands.
Sexual women.
While women's wage work and reproductive freedom threaten the traditional family by making it less necessary, sexual liberation threatens the ideological structure of the patriarchal family itself. To the extent that sexual liberation challenges compulsory heterosexuality and customary heterosexual roles--men as the promiscuous watchers, women as the chaste watched, for example--it weakens the hegemony of the traditional family. Redefining sex as a joyful and holy expression of human intelligence (as Nancy Mairs does) removes the stigma associated with sex and makes the legitimization of marriage redundant.
When satanic abuse narratives say that satanists practice ritual sex as part of their worship, they implicitly reidentify sex with evil and sexual liberation with satanism. Saying that satanists are pornographers performs the same identification, but takes advantage of people's visceral reaction to the word "pornography." Like most satanic believers, Buchanan thinks satanists fund their activities by filming sexual and sacrificial ceremonies and selling the resulting child pornography and "snuff films" (44). Like "satanism," the word "pornography" in satanic abuse narratives functions as an epithet for evil rather than a descriptive term. For example, Lauren Stratford puts lesbianism in the same category as the rape of children: both are "abnormal," evil "perversions" (67, 69), both are lumped under the label "pornography."
Lesbians.
In the recent anti-gay campaigns of the religious right, anti-gay activists often charge that gay people, who are supposedly inherently "sinful" and "perverts" by choice, are trying to "recruit" young children into becoming gay (Schulman, 284). Likewise, many satanic abuse narratives imagine the satanists as actively recruiting new members, often teenagers, into the satanic lifestyle of sin and deviant sex. Buchanan speaks of "teenagers and adults recruited" into the cult (45), and evidently such recruits are common enough that the cult can afford to slaughter a recently recruited "young married couple" (45). Buchanan does not say, but perhaps these recruits were killed because they were married, with the wife pregnant--they were too normal, too solicitous of their child, not deviant enough to be good satanists--in short, they were too heterosexual.
Feminists are still thought of as man-hating lesbians by some, evidently including Buchanan. The identifiably feminist characters in Buchanan's book are lesbians and satanists too, with her definition of "lesbian" lifted from heterosexual pornography. Laura's therapist, "Ann Wilson," seems to be a New Age feminist, working at a "women's wellness center" (147) and giving her patients statuettes of Hindu goddesses (144). Ann is a satanist, as is Laura's "admittedly gay" psychiatrist, "Dr. Curtis" (147). Buchanan describes a "ritual" in which Laura is "forced" to give Dr. Curtis "pleasure," while Ann "self stimulates" to the sight (136)--a scene that could be directly from the "girl-girl" genre of heterosexual pornography. We even have the obligatory sex scene (described as rape at gunpoint) with a man (in a police uniform no less) after the "lesbian" scene to reassert heterosexual norms (138).
"All of my best friends"--Buchanan is careful to paint herself as a progressive person, noting that two of her fellow satanic victims, "Nan" and "Shelly," are lesbian (147). Her homophobia is no less obvious for it, however. A detective investigating Laura's allegations asks her if she ever willingly had sex with Ann. "Livid," she assures him "I had never been gay. In support of survivors who were, I informed him that being gay is not an uncommon response of women brutalized by men" (181). There are countless lesbians who are not grateful to Buchanan for informing them that it's all right to be perverts, since it's only a mental illness brought on by satanist rapists. Like the born again Christian student I described in chapter two, who thought Nancy Mairs' bisexuality was caused by sexual abuse, Buchanan assumes that women desire other women only if they are abused. Since she assumes that Christians do not abuse their children, lesbians exist only because of satanic "brutalization."
Like other satanic narratives, Buchanan's book implicitly assumes that eliminating satanists will eliminate lesbians and other feminist threats to the traditional family. However, while other narratives metaphorically and unconsciously attribute abortion, working women, or lesbians to satanists, only Buchanan comes so close to making the attribution direct and conscious. Part of the lack of disguise may be due to Buchanan's mechanical passive voice writing style and to the paranoid way Laura sees everyone-- from judges and police to her own therapists--as a satanist. However, it is more likely part of the satanic abuse fable's development since its reappearance in 1980, a development that is much more visible in the narratives' symbolic comparisons of evil mothers and nurturing children, discussed in the next chapter.