And here it is – the latest Fooling Garwulf over at The Escapist, in which we look at the second episode of Penn & Teller: Fool Us, as well as women in magic.

A personal note on this one: for those who don’t know, I’m a pop culture commentator – my column is called Garwulf’s Corner (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/garwulfs-corner), and it runs on The Escapist. But, this is the revival of the column after a 14 year hiatus – it originally ran from 2000-2002 on Diabloii.net.

Coming back to pop culture commentary after 14 years was, well, jarring, as well as a bit dispiriting. Pop culture seems to have become a battlefield. From video games to Hollywood to books, a lot of fairly nasty sexism has either newly emerged or been revealed to have always been there. At times it feels like there isn’t a single corner of pop culture that doesn’t have at least some ongoing institutional effort to keep gender relations back in the 1960s and ‘70s.

But you know what? Today I get to report that magic is free of that crap. That female magicians do NOT face institutional sexism in the magic community, and that they are considered equals by their peers. Even if no other part of pop culture has this, when it comes to gender relations the performance art of magic has its act together.

And if magic, a performance art that for its many centuries and millennia of life has been overwhelmingly male, can get its act together this comprehensively, then maybe there’s hope that the rest of pop culture can too.