Sady Doyle - Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power

DRIVER: You girls watch out for those weirdos.

NANCY: We are the weirdos, mister.

The Craft (1996)

Women have always been monsters.

Female monstrosity is threaded throughout every myth youve heard, and some you havent: carnivorous mermaids, Furies tearing men apart with razor-sharp claws, leanan sdhe enchanting mortal men and draining the souls from their bodies. They are lethally beautiful or unbearably ugly, sickly sweet and treacherous or filled with animal rage, but they always speak to the qualities men find most threatening in women: beauty, intelligence, anger, ambition. In Christian myth, even the apocalypse is female. The book of Revelations prophesies that the end times will be ruled by a lustful queen, who carries a golden chalice full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. She appears drunk on the blood of saints, covered in jewels, and riding a scarlet beast with seven heads: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY , BABYLON THE GREAT , THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH .

Women have always been monsters, too, in the minds of great men; in philosophy, medicine, and psychology, the inherent freakishness of women has always been a baseline assumption. Aristotle famously concluded that every woman was a mutilated male. Menstrual blood emitted lethal miasma; a man who had sex with a woman on her period would waste away and die. Female sexuality was insatiable; if given free reign, women would seduce the Devil himself, and use their resulting satanic powers to enslave mortal men. Even in utero, the female body was vampiric. You could tell that a woman was having a daughter if she became uglier over the course of the pregnancy. A girl always stole her mothers beauty.

This fear is not a thing of the past. The killer period sex is from ancient Rome, the witches are medieval, but the mother-deforming female fetus is something people still believein today; youll find it written up on parenting websites, with explanations about hormones. The medical establishment still regards female bodies as a freakish deviation from the norm; one 2018 study found that 53 percent of female heart attack patients had been told by doctors that their symptoms were not health related. Women and men usually have different cardiac symptoms, and the doctors could only diagnose male hearts. Centuries after Aristotle, Sigmund Freud updated and expanded the mutilated male theory by arguing that women were castrated. Male and female children alike were supposedly traumatized for life by the knowledge that their mothers did not have penises, seeing the female body forever after as maimed and incompletea walking wound. Of course, when mothers do have penises, we are no less likely to judge them.

The basic premise of sexism is that, to paraphrase the noted medieval theologians Radiohead, men have the perfect bodies and the perfect souls. (Well, cisgender white men without disabilities who have never had sex with other men, anywayonce you propose a biological elite, the definitions tend to keep getting more and more elitist.) Men define humanity, and women, insofar as they are not men, are not human. Thus, women must necessarily be put under male controland to the extent that we resist this control, we are monstrous.

But a monster is not something to dismiss or look down on. A monster does not merely inspire anger or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear. Beneath all the contempt men have poured on women through the ages, all the condemnations of our Otherness, there is an unwitting acknowledgment of our powera power great enough, in their own estimation, to end the world.

The idea that men fear women feels faintly ludicrouslike an elephant panicking at the sight of a mouse, or a professional exterminator with a fear of spiders. Were told that terror is feminine, and that women are the more fearful gender. What else do you mean, when you call a guy a pussy?

Nevertheless, that fear is real. Historically, men have believed that women can destroy cities by having sex (as with Helen of Troy or the anonymous, libidinous mother of the Monster of Ravenna) or control the weather with their bodies (a witch could create a storm by letting down her hair; a woman could calm a hurricane by standing naked on the deck of a ship), or just reduce men to mindless, obedient animals (Circe, Shakespeares Cleopatra, or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, leaving a bloody trail of husbands and horny insurance salesmen in her wake). In the darker corners of the Internet, youll find frightened men discussing the Red Pill, an imaginary conspiracy in which all-powerful, man-hating feminists have rigged the modern world to suppress men and deny them human rights.

Its easy to roll your eyes at the tinfoil-hat talk, but male fear is serious: it kills women every day. Weve all grown up with the image of some inconvenient female villager killed for witchcraft, her communitys misogynist paranoia wrapping around her throat like a noose. Just as with those long-ago panics, some of the men who believe in the Red Pill conspiracyspree killer Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, who drove a van into a mostly female crowd in Torontohave murdered innocent women in the name of defending themselves from female power. The precise nature of the accusations might change, but mens underlying distrust of women remains constant.

Fear of women may be the single most important truth of misogyny. A cage, after all, has two purposes. Of course, it serves to keep women confined, hemmed into prevent us from going out into male territory and getting what men have, the jobs and money and respect and power that are so much more accessible if youre male. But the second purpose of a cagethe more interesting oneis to protect the world from what is inside it. On some level, the cage exists to keep women from getting out.

I wrote this book because I want to understand what these men are afraid of. I want to know the beast they feel breathing down their necks in the dark. Ready to break through at last. Ready to eat them.

The root of female monstrosity, Ive found, lies right where Revelations and Freud said it did: in sex, and the potent magic generated by sex, the creation of new human beings.