You’re thing about not being afraid of stupid shit reminded me of witches because the first witches were women in ancient Greece who realized that their bodies were not the property of men.

They celebrated the Bacchanalia where they’d get drunk and stoned and play music and dance wildly and have orgies in the woods, sometimes for days at a time. They were as equally likely to welcome a man into their celebrations with their bodies as they were to rip him to shreds in the midst of their fearsome revels.

The ancient Greeks, who were patriarchial, were scared of these women and shunned them from their cities and forbade Bacchanalias sometimes with the threat of execution.
Didn’t stop the witches from having their fun in secret conclaves deep in the woods or the wild parts of the world, away from the cities of men.
And the god they worshipped, Bacchus, was one of the original templates upon which Jesus Christ was later based.

He was a god-man that discovered the power of wine, inspired people to live freely and openly, and even died and was resurrected in some of the early Greek folklore.
Anyway, the custom of being afraid of witches started there and continued to modern times. The Salem witch burnings and the witch persecutions in Europe during the Middle Ages were all marked by the patriarchy being afraid of these liberated women.
And really, I think the fear came down to a simple thing: witches were women who saw their bodies and sexuality as natural expressions of life. They fucked whoever they wanted to fuck, drank wine like men did, swore, carried on, and just lived with full self-expression.

The adherents of the patriarchy, both men and women alike, couldn’t stand that because it flew in the face of their conventions, which were there to make them live small lives where sex was a dirty thing and women were expected to be submissive and weak.
So they did what all rigid-minded, scared people do when they feel that their little beliefs are threatened: they became the ultimate bitches.
Hence the trials and persecution and torture and burning of so-called witches.