The interplay of magic and the mundane in Charmed is masterful, and the sensuality of the sisters is one of the key ingredients. Unlike medieval “witches,” who hid their sexuality lest they be accused of dancing with the devil, the Halliwells dress to attract men. And they have no hang-ups about sex. Although intercourse itself is not shown on camera, there’s a lot of lusty kissing and foreplay. And the camera does venture inside the bedroom door for shots of scantily clad witches and their bed partners—before and after bopping each other’s brains out.
On Charmed, great sex is only one of life’s pleasures. These women cherish moments as ordinary as dancing in Piper’s club or cooking a family dinner in the mansion kitchen. Yet they drop the personal aspects of their lives in a heartbeat when they’re called upon to save an innocent.
And therein lies the most important aspect of Charmed. Making the witches of Prescott Street the saviors of humanity speaks volumes about the maturity of our civilization. Because monumental change in human thinking had to take place before a program like Charmed was even possible—let alone a seven-season hit with a slew of reruns.
Burning witches at the stake, or hanging them (which was the preferred method of execution in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1700s), is an unfortunate legacy of our past here in the west. But if you want to imagine what life was like for women in Medieval Europe, you have only to recall the recent Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where women were totally subjugated to men—who could beat them senseless for showing a flash of ankle beneath a burka or shoot them in the head in the middle of a sports stadium for teaching girls to read.
Luckily, our culture has gone from a time in history where women could be burned at the stake in the public square to an era where three gorgeous witches can grill steak on the barbecue just like any normal American can.
But it didn’t happen overnight.
Anyone born in the latter years of the twentieth century probably has trouble imagining a time when men virtually ruled women. When, for example, a woman’s inheritance was under the control of her husband. And when her marriage vows contained the promise to “love, honor and obey.”
If you’d rather not read any ancient (early twentieth century) history, skip right to the section below on the modern kick-ass heroine. But I do think a little historical context puts Charmed in perspective. The literature of an era is an excellent window into that society.
You may have seen the movie made from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and thought it was a quaint period piece. But the book, first published in 1905, is a chilling glimpse into Wharton’s contemporary society. It’s the story of Lily Bart, a woman with an upper-class background and little money, who refuses to marry a jerk and ends up starving to death—since there are no decent-paying jobs for a female of her social station.
Even grimmer are the novels of Wharton’s contemporary, Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie tells of a working-class woman who sinks to the lowest rungs of society because of her sexual choices. And you may have seen A Place in the Sun, based on his upbeat (not) 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. In the movie, George Eastman gets young Alice Tripp pregnant. To take care of the problem, he rows her out to the middle of a lake and bashes her over the head with an oar. How’s that for the consequences of her letting him take her to bed? Of course, Clift also gets his just desserts—after prosecuting attorney Raymond Burr reenacts the fatal blow in the courtroom.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were trapped by age-old sexist conventions. Still, the times were ripe for change—as evidenced by the women’s suffrage movement and Margaret Sanger’s crusade for birth control.
In the workplace, women took a giant leap forward with the outbreak of World War II. With the men off at war, women stepped smartly into high-paying jobs outside the home—on assembly lines, making tanks and battleships. In the evenings, these same young women partied with the soldiers and sailors.
At war’s end, the ladies were expected to scuttle back home—where they’d been since the dawn of time. But Rosie the Riveter had opened a Pandora’s Box of new options for herself and her little sisters.
Men and women’s roles had been set in stone for centuries. In mid-twentieth-century America, these slabs of granite were blown to smithereens.
The birth control pill ushered in the sexual revolution, and the women’s lib movement of the sixties and seventies turned many women into out-and-out radicals. Feminists wrote diatribes against men and marriage. Women attacked the glass ceiling in the business world. And the media rubbed their collective hands in glee at the boundless new possibilities for profit.
Suddenly, a book about men as insensitive, self-centered jerks, like Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, became a national bestseller. And the action-adventure hero had a new rival, the “kick-ass heroine,” whose early examples include Emma Peel in The Avengers and Wonder Woman.
The kick-ass trend continues with such shows as Xena, La Femme Nikita and Alias. Or consider Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. For Janeway, job one was beating the guys at their own game. Only in the holodeck could the captain let down her hair and cope with her own womanly emotions.
Heroines with the balls to fight the tough guys on their own terms became a major trend at the turn of this century.
Even Harlequin Books, whose name is a synonym for “romance,” has embraced this new phenomenon. Their entry in the female James Bond sweepstakes is a line of mass market paperbacks called Bombshell, under their Silhouette imprint. In their guidelines for writers, they’re asking for “a strong, sexy, savvy heroine, who finds herself in a dangerous, high-stakes situation.” The focus is on how she saves the day—with the romance in the story downgraded to a subplot, if it exists at all.
The early twenty-first-century kick-ass heroine is a woman who has consciously or unconsciously sacrificed her femininity to make herself into a warrior. She’s essentially a man with different protrusions—breasts instead of a penis.
Like the kick-ass heroine, the witches of Prescott Street vanquish the bad guys before breakfast—sometimes with magic and sometimes with their martial arts skills. But there’s an important difference. Unlike female James Bonds, they still embrace their womanhood and all it embodies. They need not be superheroes. Or special agents. Or the tough-as-nails commander of a Federation spaceship. They don’t have to be loners or outcasts. They can live in an old Victorian house in San Francisco and invite the neighbors in for tea. They can own a nightclub and write a newspaper advice column and take their children to school.
In fact, their femininity is just as important as their ability to kick butt. For example, consider their on-again, off-again relationship with the demon Belthazor, who takes the human form of a sexy guy named Cole Turner.
Just for fun, compare Cole to Leo, Piper’s sometime-husband. Do you ever see Leo with his shirt off? Not hardly. But the producers take every opportunity possible to showcase the broad expanse of Cole’s magnificent chest. Like when he elected to strip to the waist to give Phoebe sword fighting lessons in “Enter the Demon” in season four. Or when he was half-naked and being seduced by a female demon who incinerated men from the inside out in season five’s “Siren Song.”1
Cole/Belthazor was billed as all-powerful, even gaining the coveted underworld title of “the Source of all Evil.” Time and again he had the opportunity to kill the Charmed Ones—and kept making excuses for not doing it.
Why couldn’t he destroy them? Because he fell in love with Phoebe Halliwell.
Ultimately, her witchcraft spelled his defeat. But along the way, she used her feminine powers on him—the secret weapons that women have always possessed in any civilization. The ability to influence their husbands and raise their children with some knowledge of “feminine” values.
I gave some examples of early twentieth-century novels where the wrong sexual choices spelled the downfall of the female characters. Charmed takes a different approach. Look at the very first episode, “Something
Wicca this Way Comes.” Police were closing in on a serial killer who turned out to be a warlock bent on wiping out the witch population of San Francisco. On a more personal level, he was Jeremy, Piper’s boyfriend.
If Theodore Dreiser had written the script, the warlock would have left Piper in a pool of her own blood on the floor as retribution for letting herself be taken in by this evil guy.
Instead, she set the pattern for future Charmed episodes by narrowly escaping. And when Piper banished Jeremy from her heart, the Charmed Ones used the Power of Three for the first time to vanquish him from the Earthly plane.
Much of the focus of Charmed is on making sexual choices. And all too many turn out to be the wrong ones—at least in the short run. As Piper quipped to Paige after the Source had possessed Paige’s boyfriend and tried to turn her from good to evil (in “Charmed Again II,” the second show of the fourth season), “Yeah, well, you’re not truly one of us until you’ve dated a demon, so welcome to the club.”
In “A Knight to Remember,” Paige was revealed to be the reincarnation of a wicked witch from the Middle Ages. In her long-ago life, she worked a spell on a handsome knight and made him fall in love with her. Magic brought him to present-day San Francisco, where all he wanted was to drag Paige off to bed and get her with child. The three sisters and Leo traveled back in time to take the witch’s powers away. Even as the reincarnation of an evil seductress, Paige escaped permanent harm and went back to life as usual on Prescott Street.
Of course, the mother of all bad dates on Charmed was Phoebe’s love-hate relationship with Cole/Belthazor. If the intention of the show had been to punish wrong choices, Phoebe would have ended up in hell. Instead she got out from under Cole’s—uh—thumb and went on to embrace life again. Rather than being punished, she was rewarded with a new boyfriend, the powerful and wealthy Jason Dean, who bought the newspaper where she worked.
In Charmed, feminine values are not just okay; they are a positive aspect of the series. The Halliwell sisters may be witches, but they demonstrate to viewers week after week that being normal women, being feminine, being active participants in life around them are assets, not stumbling blocks. As women, they are never afraid to show their softer side. They are never afraid to admit that their primary interest is in love and family. They all want to marry and live happily ever after. They all embrace their sisterhood. And they call on the spirits of their female relatives in times of trouble, summoning the ghosts of Grams or their mom so that they can consult their wisdom.
In a particularly touching scene in “Charmed Again II,” they summoned their mother’s ghost so she could embrace Paige, the child she had to give up.
After Piper became a mother, she guarded her children with the fierce protectiveness of a mother lioness. And her sisters joined in as guardians of these special children. For example, in “Baby’s First Demon,” in season five, Phoebe had to deal with a new boss who had just bought the paper where she works. But she was willing to risk her job to help defend little Wyatt against a hawker demon who had been hired to kidnap him and sell him at the demon marketplace. Paige risked her life at the marketplace trying to stop the parasite demons who wanted to use Wyatt’s magic powers.
And while family comes first, they understand their broader mission—to save the world from evil. Even when they hate the warrior role they’ve been thrust into, none of them turns away from her duty to humanity.
As the sisters fight demons and other fiends week after week, they mirror a world where women are empowered as never before.
In real life, women have taken a larger role in running or influencing our society. Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Martha Stewart, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Arianna Huffington, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Mikulski, Dianne Feinstein, Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Ruth and Barbara Walters are all instantly recognizable for their important roles in our society.
And the logic circles back on itself. A series like Charmed is possible because our attitudes toward women have changed so radically since those long-ago witch burnings. Yet the show does not simply follow trends. It helps to set them—by creating an atmosphere where women of power are accepted by both male and female viewers.
When I go out to dinner and casually ask my twenty-something waitress, “Do you watch Charmed?” and she answers, “It’s my favorite show,” I feel a tingle along my nerve endings.
The success of Charmed would have been flat-out impossible before the late twentieth century. Even in mid-century, women with otherworldly powers were relegated to the role of ditz brains—like the central characters in I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched.
Did the producers of Charmed know what they had wrought? Or did they just throw the witches of Prescott Street into the big media ocean to see if they would float?
Whatever the answer, viewers are treated to a television series that builds on the gains women have made in our society and at the same time breaks new ground.
By being powerful witches and at the same time women who are not afraid to embrace their femininity and their ordinary lives, they set an example for their viewers, one that empowers women and widens their horizons. And the more women we have making important decisions in government, in education, in business and in the media, the better off we are. Or put another way—the more we embrace traditionally feminine values, the less likely we are to resort to violent solutions to political, diplomatic and economic problems. And the less likely we are to let outside or inside forces threaten our very existence as a society. For these reasons, I see Charmed as nothing short of revolutionary, a bright star blazing a path across the night sky, changing our perception of women and thus preparing the way for the next generation.
That so many viewers tune in to the witches of Prescott Street proves that our society has come a long way since the Middle Ages—even since the early twentieth century. And we’re still on the right track. So rejoice in the success of the Charmed Ones. And stay tuned for further good news from the real world.
Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author Ruth Glick writes under the name Rebecca York for Berkley and Harlequin. The author of more than a hundred books, she loves writing paranormal romantic suspense. A rabid Charmed fan, she can’t wait to read the other essays in Totally Charmed.
ENCHANTÉ . . . NOT
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PEG ALOI
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It’s no secret that Charmed is on no Wiccan Top Ten lists. Peg Aloi takes the show to task not only for violating Wiccan practice but for making it harder to be Wiccan in real life. Her suggestions for improvement include more realism, such as fewer lightning bolts and instructions on how to get wax out of a ritual robe, or in Phoebe’s case, a black lace bustier.
WELL SHIVER MY LIVER and toil my trouble, witches have become media darlings. Life’s a witch and then you fly. Just like The X-Files made the world of conspiracy theory, paranormal phenomena and alien abduction sexy and glamorous, propelling a geeky subculture of obsessed Robert Anton Wilson fans forward into social recognizability (if not acceptance), the film The Craft engendered a whole subculture of teenaged wannabe witches, gothlets and occult dabblers into the spotlight. A witchcraft zeitgeist.
1996: The year The Craft opened was the year witchcraft became a social trend gobbled up by (and eventually marketed to) the youth demographic. The hot young actresses of the film (including Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk) in black tights and noisy rosaries and glitter eye-shadow made Wicca sexy—but the film’s creators made sure not to call it anything that specific. Three goth chicks who are ostracized at their Catholic high school have been waiting for their “fourth” to complete their circle, and when a new girl arrives from the West their four directions are covered. Further, the new girl already has some magical know-how and fresh razor scars on her wrist: she is beautiful, cool, scared and scary, poised to complete their dysfunctional quaternity. But things go bad quickly, when the four start to “make things happen” and only the new g
irl understands this is not necessarily such a good thing.
The Craft was a masterpiece of both subtlety and excess. The excess was surface: fake deities, over-the-top special effects, artful production design, gotta-have-that costumes. The subtlety, however, was not. Starting with that title: The Craft. Not witchcraft. No, no. The craft. The craft of the wise? Macramé? Crafty and cunning, those producers. They made sure to utilize the visual and elemental trappings any real witch would recognize. They made sure that questions of ethics and integrity were raised, along with a highbrow moral caveat that “dabbling” in magic can lead to, well, loss of popularity, if not all-out insanity.
There was Sarah, the “natural witch” with the puritanical name, whose compassionate nature allowed her to best the three “dabblers” who wanted to harness power for selfish reasons. Bonnie, the shy one with severe burn scars on her back, would, as her name suggests, give anything to be pretty. Rochelle is sweet and gorgeous but endlessly teased by a racist teammate on the diving squad. Nancy is somewhat misanthropic but quick to befriend a like-minded soul and urge complete trust among the circle of friends. Predictably enough, once the girls discover that magic works, their biggest challenges become their worst vices: Sarah becomes manipulative with a boy who treated her badly, Bonnie becomes vain and shallow, Rochelle becomes capricious and unsympathetic, and Nancy becomes a megalomaniacal sociopath. This cautionary tale was campy, sexy and surprisingly true-to-life (well, except for all the ILM-style mumbo-jumbo effects in the last twenty minutes). It was hot, red hot—like those heated iron pincers used by medieval witch finders to goad recalcitrant witches into confessing their crimes. It had glossy production design, smart dialogue and socially provocative undertones—and so it is not at all surprising there’d be interest in creating a television show based on a similar concept. At the time, supernatural and fantasy shows were already on fire on several of the major networks: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, Hercules and their respective spinoffs Angel, Millennium and Xena: Warrior Princess. They all did well for the demographically sensitive WB, FOX and UPN. So, lessee, how about a show about . . . young . . . sexy . . . witches? Booyeah!
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