Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

by Jess Zimmerman

@lilliesuperstar: “ok horse girls definitely had an energy but lets talk about the real powerhouses of middle school weird girls: the ancient mythology stans.”

When a woman is called a “harpy” or a “gorgon” or (less disparagingly) a “screen siren,” when you are caught “between Scylla and Charybdis,” when a problem that gets worse the more you try to fix it is a “hydra,” when an unsolvable question is “the riddle of the Sphinx,” that is evidence of the outsized influence of classical lore.

The monsters in this book are part of the mythos that influenced the current dominant culture as it was being built. These are the bedtime stories patriarchy tells itself.

“the monster dwells at the gates of difference” and “the monster polices the borders of the possible.” Monsters are signposts, in other words, to separate acceptable from unacceptable, what’s allowed from what is not. Their monstrosity is deviation blown up to exaggerated size, the mythic equivalent of “If you keep doing that, your face will stick that way.”

Monsters exist in opposition to normality: exaggeratedly large or small, too many limbs or too few eyes, too complex or too rudimentary. Monstrosity is relative, born in the gulf between the expectation and the reality. Even Godzilla could live happily in a Godzilla-scale Tokyo.

For women, the boundaries of acceptability are strict, and they are many. We must be seductive but pure, quiet but not aloof, fragile but industrious, and always, always small. We must not be too successful, too ambitious, too independent, too self-centered—and when we can’t manage all the contradictory restrictions, we are turned into grotesques. Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women, in

centuries’ worth of stories, because stories are a way to encode these expectations and pass them on.

Thinness isn’t considered beautiful because it’s objectively good, but because it signals abstemiousness and fragility and a dedication to staying small. The kind of men who have been in a position to influence the culture like these things. Whiteness is considered beautiful because these same men have gross ideas about race and “purity.”

Thissss

You can tell a lot about what a culture considers deformed by looking at its villains. They’re more likely to be disabled in some way but also more likely to be dark, old, fat, or fey.

And this way we too make it so future generations consider this ugly! Changing society and the future

This is metaphorically true for all of us, but literally true for black women, since visual recording technology—like film and video cameras—is usually calibrated to white skin, expecting a white subject.

She didn’t say, but didn’t need to, that while disabled men are also subject to a host of degradations and injustices, this particular experience—of being negated as an object of desire, and then effectively negated as a person because you are not desirable—is the province of women, because of the way our humanity has always been contingent on our beauty.

There is no male-controlled culture that by default allows women to be seen. Some

We’re obscured not by cloth but by disregard, by the way men are taught to devalue us and we are taught to devalue ourselves. It’s only beauty—and specifically femininity, and even more specifically, sexual attractiveness to men—that burns through the fog. It’s no wonder we’ll kill ourselves chasing it. Beauty is a currency, but it’s also a baseline: the place you have to stand to be noticed, the thing that makes you real.

This idea

clothes. If a woman is not beautiful, she must be invisible; if a woman is extraordinary, therefore, she must be beautiful. Who ever heard of an extraordinary ghost?

Few cultural properties have even tried to put forth a truly ugly heroine. In recent years, for instance, we’ve gotten to see television’s version of George R. R. Martin’s Brienne of Tarth, described as hideous in the novels but played onscreen by Gwendolyn Christie, who is just tall. Somewhat more transgressive is Furiosa of Mad Max: Fury Road, visibly disabled and stripped of her hair and other feminine signifiers, but still portrayed by Charlize Theron, perfect face and figure and all, under the motor-oil makeup. What would a heroine look like who truly embodied the unbeautiful wilderness? Would she have the Gorgon’s beard or tusks, or something else entirely? We deserve her. But do we know how to imagine her? Would we know how to see her, if she appeared?

Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live.

Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie.

It’s only in turning away from the tiny target that you see the infinite space surrounding it. You’re not supposed to do this, of course. You’re supposed to be ashamed of your ugliness. Why? Because it’s objectively shameful? Or because it reduces your value as a decoration, a prize, an advertisement—because it benefits nobody but yourself?

Ugliness has always had power, but the power has been used to segregate and threaten and destroy. What happens if the Gorgon rises, not a shield for the status quo but its worst nightmare? What happens if Medusa takes back her power, her gift? If the ugly come for their own?

The primary effect was that I lost the ability to tell when I was hungry. Having yoked the act of eating—or not eating—to things like social standing and personal worth, I had unlinked it from the needs of my actual body. I didn’t know how to recognize that I needed to eat, or make the necessary provisions. Sometimes I wouldn’t realize it until the point of meltdown. More than once, I spent months plagued by mysterious

This is me

Rediscovering hunger took concerted effort—effort that, honestly, still only works when I’m concentrating. When I’m not, I’ll frequently leave out eating for most of the day, then make myself sick because my disastrously belated lunchtime runs up too close to my socially mandated dinner. Sometimes, hunger doesn’t even kick in until someone puts food in front of me. I will rely on any other cue—the ease or difficulty of procuring food, the time of day, what other people are doing, the timing of my work and gym and social plans—before I’ll remember to look inward.

The men who own the cattle because they claimed the cattle, and fight off any foul monster who tries to take them back. The men who think defending what they’ve stolen means they owned it all along.

because matching with men ambition for ambition is seen as greed and theft.

This means that any progress we make towards reclaiming our most intimate property meets with the same kind of anti-Harpy horror, the fear of women trespassing on and befouling what is men’s sole privilege to trespass on and befoul.

We are going against both nature and ethics, apparently, by influencing whether we use our bodies as incubators. The natural order of things is that the disposition of your uterus is controlled by a panel of men.

For women to have full autonomy is for men to be deprived of their sex objects, their incubators, their trump cards. We are the Harpies swooping down to steal the spoils, and we are the cows.

But the fear of Harpies infects even those who think of themselves as the good guys, the staunch promoters of justice. So many people believe in gender equality, as long as reaching equality doesn’t mean taking anything from men. As long as women stay within their rightful territory, defined as “all the territory men didn’t annex for themselves.”

there is nothing unnatural about this tableau: a young woman on her literal and figurative knees in front of a more powerful, wiser male figure. This is Jane Eyre and Rochester, Dorothea and Casaubon, Bella and Edward, every student-professor liaison in every work of literary fiction I’ve ever refused to read.

This is why we have tropes like the Magical Negro and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so even those Others whose special skills and insights are acknowledged must be seen putting them to use for the good of the white male hero. This is also why we normalize, even valorize, the idea of the naive young woman and the authoritative man. If you set things up so the Other has no chance to challenge you—because she can’t get a foothold, because the rules won’t let her

“I often talk about emotional labor as being the work of caring,” wrote MetaFilter commenter Lyn Never. “And it’s not just being caring, it’s that thing where someone says ‘I’ll clean if you just tell me what to clean!’ because they don’t want to do the mental work of figuring it out. Caring about all the moving parts required to feed the occupants at dinnertime, caring about social management. It’s a substantial amount of overhead, having to care about everything. It ought to be a shared burden, but half the

User MonkeyToes summed it up: The foundation and fertilizer of unequal emotional labor is “the expectation that women will be naturally, effortlessly skilled at 1) keeping track of what’s important to family members, friends of the family, work colleagues; 2) having antennae out for others’ invisible and subtle expectations/missives/tone/frequency of contact/mood/needs; 3) noticing entropy and taking note of potential problems; 4) acting as a fixer-facilitator-logistics coordinator; 5) making things comfortable/easy/nonthreatening for others; while 6) doing this on an unpaid basis; 7) doing this on an unnoticed basis; 8) being mocked and/or gaslighted for mentioning the existence of all of this as work, and as exhausting; 9) being called nags and told to lower our standards, because we notice so much; and 10) feeling like we are failing at ‘being in charge of everyone’s happiness.’” If that was tiring to read, consider how exhausting

That’s how you knew her love was truly unconditional: if she could have loved you less, if she could have cared less, if she could have given less, she certainly would have. The fact that she didn’t was proof that she couldn’t possibly. Most people who tout unconditional love still think they have some kind of option. She knew she didn’t. My grandmother didn’t love anyone she didn’t feel she had to, but her love, once given, was an obligation to both of you: it could not be turned off or turned aside.

different forms of marginalization overlap and intensify one another; a black woman, for instance, is simply not experiencing the same kind of sexism as a white woman, because she is experiencing sexism that intersects with racism. The two are not separate, or even uncomplicatedly additive. Class, disability, sexuality, and other areas of potential oppression also overlap—or maybe it’s more accurate to say they weave together, since “overlap” implies they can be pulled apart. Intersecting oppressions aren’t a quilt over a blanket. They’re a yellow warp of sexism and a blue weft of racism mingling to form green. Crenshaw,

Race and other intersections can’t be secondary concerns. We can’t aim for women’s solidarity first, and address racism second, because to do so means solidarity is only achievable by people who aren’t also experiencing racism.

The recognition that our lives are far from identical is part of the project; it allows us to step in where others are cut down or bashed in or weak. Our task is not to share a heart but to share a goal, where the goal is liberation. Our great strength, if we can use it, is that we cannot be completely destroyed—that whatever angle we’re attacked from, there will always be more of us, riled up and righteous and coming back twice as hard.

They may not understand each other. But two hundred eyes, or near enough, still turn in the end towards a mutual goal: to live, to move forward, to resist attack, to grow instead of diminish. To double in strength with every strike instead of striking at ourselves. To surge with a poison so strong that our pain alone can kill an enemy. To know who the enemy is.

I think a lot about shame, about the way it’s shaped me. What would my life be like if I wasn’t fundamentally ashamed of myself,

I hadn’t been ashamed of everything about myself for as long as I can remember? It’s almost impossible to imagine. So many of my choices have been animated by the desire to hide or apologize. The shame-free version of me would have gone to school differently, traveled differently, dated differently, lived differently, worked differently, written this book differently.

I am ashamed of not being prettier, more physically and socially graceful, more successful, more talented, smarter, nicer to be around. I am ashamed of having needs, hungers, smells, exudations, stumbles, misconceptions, ambitions that shade perhaps into delusions. I am, in short, ashamed of every way I impinge on others, every way I overstep the bounds of what I’m supposed to be.

We swell up with shame, fertilized by all the expectations thrust upon us: the expectation to be small, to be pretty, to be pristine and calm and simple and undemanding and just stupid enough not to seem like a challenge. Monsters are created in the difference between what we are supposed to be and what we are.