![]() ![]() Women kill in the home, or near it, and we kill people we know, targeting partners, children or the elderly, mostly by poisoning or some other indirect method. And there’s an accepted ‘female’ typology of killing, too. So, this argument goes, we do not use violence instrumentally to get what we want, or simply because we feel like it, but because we’re driven to it. It presupposes that women resort to violence only as a last-ditch response to intolerable past abuse, or because they are in fear of their lives or mentally ill. The roster of ‘female-friendly’ motives for violence is largely reactive. We rarely question the gendered language of motive that reinforces essentialist assumptions and explains away female violence. As crime writer Melanie McGrath has pointed out, female killers, when they exist in fiction, are almost always motivated by revenge or, less-often, insanity: There’s also the question of what kind of killers women get to be when they do appear-both in terms of how they’re portrayed in the media and in terms of how they’re written into fiction. “I think society is in denial that women are capable of such hideousness,” evolutionary psychologist Marissa Harrison (who studies serial killers) told Emily Anthes for The New Yorker. But again, it’s that fantastical element that makes the figure so alluring. Patrick Bateman, Humbert Humbert, Tom Ripley, Raskolnikov. But it’s the very fact that film and literature are strewn with the bodies of dead girls makes the killer woman so attractive-she’s not only escaped victimhood but stepped into the role of the aggressor, and thus fully reversed her fate. And when you (or at least I) think of “literary murderers,” the list of names that springs to mind first is almost entirely male. Women in America are constantly told that their body is the purview of others-we are told this on the street, by catcallers, and at the highest level of our government-so there’s something thrilling in reclaiming that agency at the edge of a knife.ĭon’t get me wrong: American culture as a whole is still much more obsessed with the idea of the beautiful dead girl than it is with the beautiful deadly girl. There’s also, particularly for female readers and consumers, the very delicious sense of power seized-power, specifically, of the body, of which women in our culture are so frequently deprived. Her existence is a violent (pun intended) transgression against our ingrained social notions of femininity. But the female murderer doesn’t feel merely uncommon, but nearly taboo-because she represents not only a subversion of expected gender roles, but a pretty significant reversal. The relative scarcity of the female murderer interests us on a base level-if mystery appeals, so does the unusual. Think of it this way: how many times, on television or in film, have you seen a man punch another man for insulting or otherwise displeasing him? How many times have you seen it taken seriously? How many times have you seen it played for laughs? How many times have you seen a woman punch another woman, for any reason at all? So who do you think might be more likely to punch someone that angers them-a little boy or a little girl? ![]() That is, there’s no “hardwiring” here-men’s brains may make them more vulnerable to violent actions, but male violence seems to have much more to do with the fact that our culture presents violence as a viable, acceptable response to negative emotions or stimuli for men, and does not do the same for women. The reasons for this, at least in life, are complex and not fully understood, but it seems to be a function of the neurobiological differences in the brains of different sexes combined with the way men and women are socialized in America. Violent crimes are much more likely to be committed by men, both in life and in literature. But, you may well ask, why?įirst, there’s the question of quantity. Just look at some of the highly-gendered theories about the murder: she was a secret lesbian! She was driven mad by menstruation! As a culture, we’re morbidly obsessed with the concept of the female murderer. But it’s also because Lizzie Borden was a woman. ![]() Sure, it’s partially because unsolved crimes always appeal. 125 years is a long time, and yet we’re still thinking about Lizzie Borden, and children are still telling her story-in rhyme, no less-to one another on the playground. Today is the 125th anniversary of the day Lizzie Borden took an axe and (probably) killed her father and stepmother with a varying number of whacks. ![]()
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