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Quick: Name a female magician. Just one, dead or alive. Go!
You probably can’t. And it’s not your fault; there aren’t many of ‘em.
For a while, if people thought a woman had magic powers, they called her a “witch” and killed her. Once people figured out magic isn’t real, illusionists started dressing women in ugly costumes and shoving them into boxes. The women were impaled, bisected and decapitated. But this time it was pretend, so I guess that’s progress?
Rick Lax
Rick Lax is a Vegas-based deception expert. He wrote the books Fool Me Once and Lawyer Boy, and created the TV show Wizard Wars, which currently airs on Syfy, Thursdays at 10pm. You can follow him on Twitter @ricklax.
There’s nothing wrong with a magician using a woman (or a man) as a physical object; problem was, in the past, every woman who showed an interest in magic was immediately relegated to the assistant role. Sure, a handful of women resisted this relegation and tried their hand at the spotlight, but none of them fully grabbed the American public’s attention.
Women like Eusapia Palladino, Sylvia Browne, and the Long Island Medium have achieved fame performing magicians’ tricks (parlor illusions, mentalism and cold reading), but they’ve presented themselves as psychics and mediums. A far lower hurdle to jump. (It’s easy for you to trick people when they don’t know you’re tricking them.)
Paradoxically, when a woman does identify as a magician, people find ways to rob her of credit. Look to wife-and-husband team Mistie and Kyle Knight. They just won Syfy’s magic competition show Wizard Wars. But when they perform on cruise ships, sometimes, after the show, people will ask Mistie, “Do you know how the tricks are done?”
“Obviously that’s hugely frustrating,” Mistie says, “because I’m involved in every aspect of the show—writing the script, creating the illusions, building the props.”
If female magicians can’t get support from the general public, can they at least find support within the magic community?
Not even close.
A white suburban boy bought a trick deck of cards? Stop the presses!
I started magic when I was four, but I didn’t “come on the scene” until I hit 28. In the past four years, I’ve consulted for David Copperfield, designed illusions for Penguin Magic (the biggest magic shop in the world) and created a magic TV show called Wizard Wars, which currently airs on Syfy. But I had 24 years to practice before anyone noticed me. And believe me, going unnoticed wasn’t hard.
A white suburban boy bought a trick deck of cards? Stop the presses!
By comparison, the SECOND a woman expresses interest in magic, a herd of guys appears at her doorstep, offering free lessons, used props and used routines. (My girlfriend couldn’t complete the sentence, “I think I want to learn some basic-” before some guy threw a copy of Corinda’s 13 Steps to Mentalism at her. “Some guy” being code for “me.”) After a month, a second group of guys offers this woman stage time and TV spots. All of a sudden, this poor novice finds herself performing before a paying audience.
Does she suck? We all suck when we start out. But this woman is sucking alongside guys who’ve had the luxury of honing their craft for decades.
If you were to put this woman alongside guys who’ve been performing as long as she has, she’d do fine. But that never happens. Guys who’ve only performed magic a couple months almost never get on stage. They certainly don’t get on TV. I’ve helped booked the shows and I’ve read the resumes.
Why?
Researchers Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson gave SAT problems to two groups of kids. Each group contained some black kids and some white kids. The first group was told that the questions measured intelligence; the second group was told that the questions were a “laboratory problem-solving task that was nondiagnostic of ability.”
In the first group, the white kids substantially outperformed the black kids. In the second group the white kids and the black kids performed pretty much the same.
What the hell?
Here’s what the hell: Black kids know the stereotype that white kids are smarter. So when the black kids in the fist group heard, “intelligence test,” they got stressed out and started focusing on their performance, as opposed to focusing on the SAT problems. Then they noticed their stress and tried to suppress it, which further distracted them. The black kids in the second group didn’t have to deal with any of that; they just answered questions correctly, same as the white kids.
That was the original “Stereotype Threat” study, but since then, similar experiments have been conducted with gender as the variable.
1) If you tell a female chess player, “People think that men are better than women at chess,” she’ll play worse. You don’t even have to tell her, “Men are better”; you merely have to say, “a stereotype exists that men are better,” and it’ll throw her off her game. She’s not afraid the stereotype is true; she’s afraid of giving ammunition to those who believe it.
2) An experimenter gave two groups of women identical math tests. Each woman from the first group took the test alongside two other women. Each woman from the second group took the test alongside two guys. The women in the first group scored 15% higher than the women in the second group.
Do similar scenarios exist in the magic world? Yes, but times ten. Female magicians are hyperaware of how their male counterparts’ perception. And female magicians always perform alongside men. But in magic, women aren’t outnumbered 2-to-1; they’re outnumbered probably 100-to-1.
No Magician Is an Island
If you want to get good, you need help. I ask my magician friends Bizzaro and Justin Flom for help every day. It’s no big deal. But if I were a female magician, I’d probably ask twice before asking men for help.
Will they laugh at me? Will they talk about me behind my back? Do they really think I have potential or are they just trying to sleep with me?
Those are all valid questions. Especially the last one. Seriously, if a female magician performed the most amazing illusion in history, you know what the response would be? One of two things:
“She’s hot.”
or
“She’s ugly.”
The deck is stacked against female magicians in every way imaginable. Hell, even the “stacked deck” phrase brings to mind men who believe women can’t do card tricks because their hands are too small. (Check out the “Hands too small to palm cards?” thread on TheMagicCafe. You’ll find it in the “Feminine Mystique” subsection. Any man who makes this claim needs to watch Ekatarina Dobrokhotova and Angela Funovits’s manipulation vidoes.)
Yet, despite these insurmountable odds, great female magicians take the stage regularly.
And people are just starting to notice. Mistie Knight—the magician who performs with her husband Kyle—says she’s gotten more respect as of late.
“I’ve finally seen people embrace the fact that I’m an individual performer as well,” she tells me. “It’s a welcome change. People now know us as ‘Kyle and Mistie,’ each performing magic.”
Look to UK magician Billy Kidd, who recently crossed over to (well-deserved) American fame. She shines in Discovery Channel’s Breaking Magic and Syfy’s Wizard Wars. Look to The Magic Castle’s Tina Lenert, who was voted Stage Magician of the Year by the Academy of Magical Arts. Lenert’s act isn’t just one of the best acts in magic; it’s one of the best acts in showbiz.
Admittedly, my list of amazing female magicians is short. I’ve named only five women in this story whereas I could easily name 50 amazing male magicians. So—brace for math—if there were 10 male magicians for every female magician, we could reason that things were even. But, like I said, there are probably 100 male magicians for every female magician, so it seems as though women are actually 10 times better. Or, more technically, ‘magic greatness’ is more prevalent in females by a factor of 10.
Let’s try an analogy: Four New York Governors have gone on to become President of the United States. While this number represents fewer than 10% of total U.S. Presidents (we’ve had 43 total), it’s still damn impressive. Nobody in her right mind would argue, “Fewer than ten percent of Presidents were New York Governors, so being Governor of New York makes you less electable than the average candidate.”
But that, pretty much, is what people say about women in magic.
Billy Kidd Has a Question for You
And that question is: “When was the last time you thought about giving a young girl a magic set for her birthday?”
See, Kidd’s only been doing magic for a decade, and she’s rightfully jealous of me and the rest of us guys who received magic sets as kids.
“If somebody gave me that opportunity,” she says, “I would have fallen into magic back then.” Now she’s forced to play catch-up.
Why didn’t anyone give Kidd a magic set? Why are there so few women in magic? Because girls didn’t have any relatable magic role models—simple as that.
I’m happy to say “didn’t” in place of “don’t”; today, across the country, girls are turning on the TV and discovering women like Christen Gerhart, Krystyn Lambert and Angela Funovits —women with the minds of magicians and the appearance of pop stars. If you turn down the Ariana Grande and the Jessie J, you can hear the girls say, “When I grow up, I want to be like them.”
They’re referring to the magicians.
These girls will start with a Barbie Appracadabra Magic Set. Soon they’ll find their way to Penguin Magic (the largest magic shop in the world). Then they’ll join the International Brotherhood of Magicians (which will soon contemplate a more gender-inclusive name-change).
There’ll be so many of these girls that us guys won’t be able to shine a spotlight on all of them. We don’t have that many spotlights.
The girls will practice in obscurity, seek and receive help, grow. And by the time they come on the scene, I’ll be the one shoved into the box.
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