Arm Candy Isn't Our Style
Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina Spellman. Image courtesy of Netflix.
It’s the perfect time of year to watch The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (available on Netflix). As Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) says in the first episode, in the quaint town of Greendale, “every day feels like Halloween.” The show is visually dark and the characters’ vaguely 70s-inspired earth-tone outfits definitely evoke the feeling of fall foliage, but it’s also a good show to pop on if you want something spooky without actually being scared.
The series follows Sabrina as she grapples with her identity as half-witch, half-mortal and her friends and obligations in both of those respective worlds. While Sabrina battles with the common monsters of any coming-of-age plotline—love triangles, navigating high school friendships, breaking free of her teenage self-obsession long enough to lend a hand to her friends and family during hard times—the show also explores the role of women in a patriarchal society.
In the first season, Sabrina founds a club at her high school to bring her female classmates together, forming a collective front against bullying and discrimination. She’s raised by her two aunts, both strong matriarchal figures, and it’s no surprise that she clashes with the sexist customs and mysogynistic male leadership of her coven, The Church of Night. There, women are subservient to men and never allowed to assume the church’s most powerful positions, as High Priests or the Anti-Pope.
The Church of Night is an inversion of Christian religions, so lust, passion, and vengeance are encouraged among its members. But even so, the role of its female members is familiar: women battle for the attention and affection of the High Priest and they are viewed as objects to be lusted over during pagan and Satanic rituals. When Sabrina is indoctrinated to the church after her Dark Baptism, she quickly discovers that its maniacal male leader is driving the church to embrace the “old ways,” complete with plenty of female sacrifices, intolerance of “mortals,” limiting witches to studying housekeeping magics, and relegating witches to lives as housewives and servants to warlocks. (Too real?)
Sabrina campaigns for reform and equality in the church, with her aunts leading a move in the third season to worship Lilith instead of Lucifer, but the fight for equality doesn’t stop there. Sabrina also refutes microaggressions, which is relatively rare to see in television. When she doubts the loyalty of her boyfriend, the evocatively-named Nick Scratch (played by the equally evocatively-named Gavin Leatherwood), she confronts him and he accuses her of being jealous—a tired, but standard reaction. Instead of doubting herself or her feelings, she gets up and leaves, refusing to be gaslit or treated as anything less than his equal. In a later fight, when he attempts to flatter her and asks if she’ll be his beautiful stage assistant for a magic show, she says that being arm candy isn’t really her style. Her complete self-assurance and albeit inconsistent rejection of common flatteries is refreshing, but for viewers ingrained in modern-day Western reality, it’s nearly as jarring to have those social norms called out as it is to hear characters pray “Satan curse us all” before bed.
The show also deals with the gender transition of one of Sabrina’s friends, Theo (played by Lachlan Watson, who is non-binary), in a graceful and inclusive way. Rosalind gently explains to Harvey (and perhaps confused viewers) that Theo used to be a girl, but now he’s a boy, and it’s as simple as that.
Sabrina and her friends deal with sexuality in a refreshingly mature way, though they aren’t quite as mature as the characters in Sex Education, another of our favorite coming-of-age Netflix series. This group of teens is more prone to throwing fits and acting out, but then again, didn’t we all in high school?
If you’re looking to embrace the spirit of spookiness and briefly escape the news cycle, consider a trip to the world of Greendale. After all, “It’s the witching hour somewhere.”