Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

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.

When you embrace imperfection, your own imperfection stops consuming you. When your own imperfection stops consuming you, the imperfection itself can be art.

The monsters of myth have been stationed at those borders in order to keep us out; they are intended as warnings about what happens when women aspire beyond what we’re allowed.

What was it like for the sirens on their lonely rock, watching everyone who tried to love them drown?

...and Athena, it must be admitted, has never been much of a friend to her fellow women. The war-like goddess of wisdom, who wasn't even gestated by a women (she sprang fully grown from her father's head), is the original "not-like-the-other-girls" girl.

As always in myth, women win their fame by dying.

When you’ve burned out all your circuits adoring someone for nothing, getting to be indifferent feels like grace.

Women may look harmless on the face, they said, but look at their snake hair and dog crotches and claws. Look at them crouched over a male victim, ready to bite. Beware their ambition, their ugliness, their insatiable hunger, their ferocious rage.

Before Lamia killed children, her children were killed. The root of her violence, like the root of so much violence, is grief.

The harpy wants to win, which means a man must lose. She wants justice, which means a man must be punished. She wants space that could be taken by a man. Are we really willing to make that sacrifice? What makes a woman's ambition predatory, we are told, is that it overflows its natural bounds. It treads on the lands that men have marked as theirs.

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.

Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women.

This is our strength: that each of us has the capacity to be not only a monster but a mother of monsters. We can birth from our own bodies every one of men’s worst fears.

For double X humans, our motley nature is usually less obvious, but we are genetic calicos. Every cell hosting a dormant sister. Every cell with the echo of what it could've been. Inside each of us, another animal, sleeping.

I never go to the doctor, though, because the only thing more embarrassing than having a body is having to admit that you have one.

Beauty is demonstrably a cheat code for a slightly easier life. People just a little more likely to do you a favor, love just a little easier to access, the world just a little more welcoming.