Why Are We Fascinated By 'Evil Women'? | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘I was also thinking of, you know, the the role of women in the wars in the, in the former Yugoslavia, and how they were very, very involved in the torture camps, I could have chosen the women in, for example, the Democratic Republic of Congo, during that conflict, where something like 40% of the rapes that took place actually involved women as perpetrators. So there was a huge range of things I could have looked at.
And in the end, I decided to take really just six kind of different kinds of evil that women participated in or were involved with. And so these are broad categories. So as you say, I started with, I had to start really with the original kind of evil, I mean, Eve, who brought sin into the world, brought death into the world. So she was an obvious one to start with.
Then, of course, I moved to, well, witches, you know, the very big category of evil and I choose here, the sort of evil queen in Snow White, and the Seven Dwarfs. Then monstrous evil. I mean, people don't know about her very much Amelia Dyer, she was responsible for the killing of around 400 infants in Victorian Britain, to this kind of monstrous, evil.
Sexual evil. Matahari, responsible, allegedly, for the deaths of around 50,000 French soldiers through her treachery. So this is the treacherous sexual woman. Institutional evil, Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and then Radical Evil. The sadistic sexual killer, Myra Hindley.
So these I thought were kind of representative categories. And I think the other thing here is I had to think really carefully about what I actually meant by evil… the whole series of lectures problematize and question the way we talk about evil in itself, let alone female, evil, because every generation sort of reinvents what they think is evil. And I think that's one of the reasons why this is so particularly interesting...
We are fascinated with evil women. We’re fascinated much more so than evil men. And I think one of the reasons for that is they not only do or allegedly do bad things, but they are transgressive. They transgress the fundamental issue of what we think popularly as, as femininity. And this makes them really, really intriguing. I think the other reason we're obsessed with evil women, is because evil women or designation of certain women is evil, is really at the heart of the control of women within society of patriarchal norms...
One of the things I think I want to argue in my, my talk on on the Evil Queen and Snow White is that who is really evil in that in that story? In that story, the real evil thing is actually that shimmering mirror, the misogynistic mirror, who tells this beautiful, powerful, older woman, that she is ugly, and therefore incites all this this jealousy and this cruelty...
Amelia Dyer[’s]... case excited, huge amount of attention, because it coincided with the establishment of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It's very interesting here, that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established 50 years before this. Okay, so it took 50 years for a similar society to be established for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And funnily enough, or perhaps not surprisingly, the Society for the Prevention of Cruel, Cruelty to Children actually modeled itself explicitly on the equivalent society for animals. And indeed, the first case that was brought to court, the actual infant was actually described as a little animal.
So it coincided, you know, the discovery of these bodies coincided with something was already happening in Victorian, late Victorian society at that time, this realization that children were, needed to be protected, that children suffered pain. Today, we take it for granted that in fact, children, infants experience pain. But in fact, even the top scientists of the 1870s and 1890s, did not actually believe that young infants actually experienced or felt pain, they thought it was just, when a child cried, they thought it was just a reflex action, like it was, they believed for animals'...
‘If you were going to do a lecture in 30 years about an evil woman that encapsulated the time we live in today, what do you think that she might look like?’
‘I think I've got a negative response to that, because I'm very worried about our current position, with the the rise of real powerful feminist movements. And me too, #MeToo, I think, you know, women accusing powerful men of sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, I think that I do worry that in the future, people may look back and say, you, these women, were actually hurting men. So it's a kind of 21st century Mormism, fear that that I have. And so I view a backlash against powerful young women today, who are talking out against the sort of casual misogyny that we see in current society.’"
Not mentioned: that we are fascinated with evil women because there's a sexist conception of women as good and men as evil. But then, feminism isn't good at reflexivity
Even powerful women have no agency - if
they murder other woman out of jealousy, it's not their fault but the
fault of the people who proximately made them jealous: even if they were
telling the truth (indeed, even if they were magically compelled to
tell the truth)