by Sady Doyle
Yet Sil’s quest to fulfill every single female stereotype from a bad ’90s stand-up routine is not really meant to amuse us. It’s meant to be terrifying. The fact that she’s feminine is what makes her monstrous—a Melusine whose dragon nature is always lurking just under the surface. Once a woman is free to desire and pursue her own desires, she moves beyond the reach of our empathy; she’s a threat that must be contained or destroyed.
Old Deceivers
Pop culture offers us no shortage of animal seductresses—women who conceal their monstrous appetites under a pretty face. The most famous is 1942’s Cat People, in which a young bride named Irena is convinced she is descended from a pack of satanic witches, and that so much as kissing her husband would cause her to transform into a ravenous panther and maul him to death. The lineage continues on, to the 1982 remake of Cat People, or to Ginger Snaps, where lycanthropy is a disastrous outgrowth of teen-2girl horniness. Nor has Lamia left the picture: in Jennifer’s Body, the titular Jennifer is a cheerleader possessed by a succubus. She looks like Megan Fox, until she unhinges her jaw to reveal she has a snake’s fanged, elastic mouth.
Plenty of these portrayals hint at more commonly concealed desires, which are less cannibalistic than they are “not heterosexual”: Irena’s “panther” side, for example, is denoted not only by a lack of sexual interest in her husband, but by the fact that beautiful women give her uncomfortably intimate greetings in restaurants. Jennifer, when she’s not eating boys, seduces her best friend, Needy. The fear of female sexual liberation has always been partly a fear that women will develop desires that don’t include men.
But there is another group of marginalized women who bear the brunt of our fears nowadays—made to hold the bag for our ideas of deceptive femininity and killer shape-shifters. Transgender women have always existed. But in literature, they have seldom been anything other than monsters.
Again, you can look to the Romantics here. There is clearly something happening in the scene where Geraldine strips for Christabel:
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!20
Christabel, unshielded, goes ahead and has sex with Geraldine anyway; Geraldine uses her supernatural powers to cast a spell that forbids Christabel to say what Geraldine’s body looks like. Coincidentally, in the prophetic vision that announces Geraldine’s arrival, she is described as “a bright green snake,” and in one moment of confrontation, we seem to get a glimpse of Geraldine’s true, hideous form:
A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy;
And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head,
Each shrunk up to a serpent’s eye.21
But, though Samuel Coleridge was indeed a weirdo, the trope of the gender-ambiguous snake-lady does not originate with him. In fact, the whole tradition of phallic snake imagery around the Lamia may be based on euphemism. In his play Peace, Aristophanes refers to “the unwashed balls of a Lamia.”22 An illustration from The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, a bestiary first published in 1658, depicts “the Lamia” with a lion’s body, reptilian scales, human breasts, and a penis.23
Gender fluidity has always been a mark of the otherworldly: in medieval Europe, people believed that the succubus, a female demon of lust, “acquires (in various disreputable ways) semen ejaculated by a man. Pausing only to change sex, the demon now in male form as an incubus has sex with a woman, who may indeed become pregnant as a result.”24 To a contemporary reader, this seems less like demonic activity and more like a convenient way to explain how your semen wound up in Hildegard from down the street, but the idea was no doubt more terrifying in a pre-Maury era.
Asking transgender women to find power in monstrosity is complicated. Monsters can be beautiful; possessed of a certain archaic, queenly violence or a joyful Lucy Westenra indifference to convention, something like the wild vision offered by trans feminist Elena Rose in her own call for a “feminism of the monstrous.” Rose calls monstrosity an ethos of “the cobbled-together, the sewn-up, the grafted-on…the golden, the under-the-earth, the foreign, the travels-by-night; the filthy ship-sinking cave-dwelling bone-cracking gorgeousness that says hell no, I am not tidy. I am not easy.”25
But in contemporary horror, transgender monsters are rarely so majestic. The current figures of reference are more like creepy, lotion-basket-invoking Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, stealing women to make a skin suit, or the deranged trans slashers in Sleepaway Camp or Insidious: Chapter 2, whose violence supposedly betrays that they are “really” men; not just frightening, but broken and pathetic. We’re invited to look down on them or laugh at them even as the “good” cis characters barely escape them with their lives. Possibly the only trans-adjacent villain who is allowed any real power or hotness is Dr. Frank N. Furter, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Frank is played for camp.
“When we see serial killer Buffalo Bill in their most famous scene,” writes Mey Rude, “it is meant to be one of the most jarring and disturbing moments of the film. We see someone who is presented to us as a man tucking their penis between their legs, wearing a wig made from a woman’s scalp, swaying and dancing to music. Growing up, I remember many times hearing that this was one of the strangest and creepiest scenes in modern film. This action of putting on makeup and a wig, tucking and trying to look as beautiful and feminine as you can is something that a lot of us trans women can relate to. It’s something that a lot of us trans women have done. And here it is being presented as the epitome of horror.”26
This kind of story has a price, and that price is paid in blood. In 2017, The New York Times found that “on average, one to two [transgender people] have been killed somewhere in the United States every week.”27 That number rises every year. In 2017, Ally Lee Steinfeld, a seventeen-year-old trans girl in Mississippi, was found with both her eyes gouged out and multiple stab wounds in her genital region. She had also been set on fire. Like Bridget Cleary before her, it was not entirely clear whether the fire killed Steinfeld, or whether it was one last insult to her corpse. Somehow, the authorities ruled that her murder had not been a hate crime.
These women’s killers typically defend themselves by saying that their victims were scary, that they “tricked” them. When seventeen-year-old Gwen Araujo was beaten to death with a shovel by two of her ex-boyfriends, Alameda County assistant district attorney Chris Lamiero claimed that Araujo made decisions that were “impossible to defend” by dating the men in question: “I don’t think most jurors are going to think it’s OK to engage someone in sexual activity knowing they assume you have one sexual anatomy when you don’t.”28
When we project all our anxieties about feminine sexual power onto real, marginalized women, we become a nation of Michael Clearys, shrieking about the harm done to us by “deceivers,” unable to see that the real threat is us—the people holding the lit match, pouring grease on the flames.
Fatal Attractions
The stereotypes that transphobes use to damn transgender women’s sexuality are, on some level, the same as the ones used to damn all female sexuality: deceptive, malevolent, an irresistible incitement to violence for any men who are “tempted” or “led on” by the woman in question. Though the hatred for trans and queer women is louder and more intense—and though there’s less social stigma attached to voicing it—it nevertheless stems from the same basic patriarchal need for control.
Male sexual access to women is the bedrock of patriarchy. Unless cisgender men can get cisgender women to sleep with them, they cannot get them pregnant; unless they can guarantee those women are monogamous, they cannot be sure that the resulting ch
ildren are theirs. Every story we tell about sexuality, every bit of dirtiness or shame we attach to it, is aimed at reinforcing that basic power dynamic: Men must be free to sleep with women, and women must not be free to sleep with men. Or with other women, or with anyone, except for the one lucky fellow who’s purchased the right to impregnate her. (This, admittedly, puts a very sinister spin on engagement ring commercials: a diamond is forever.) Female sexuality can exist only with male permission, in answer to male need, and in fact, female desire is so inherently subversive that it’s best to just pretend it doesn’t exist.
Transgender and queer women are subject to a special hatred and violence because when patriarchy is sold to us as the only “natural” family structure, any evidence that nature does not conform to patriarchal ideals has to be suppressed. (Leave alone, for a minute, the fact of women having sex with each other—the existence of women who can feasibly get each other pregnant is an existential threat.) Even sexually available, straight, cisgender women—home-wreckers and temptresses, sex workers and secretaries, girls who go wild and girls who cry rape—invite hatred and disgust. They’re free agents, women whose sexuality has not yet been put under a husband’s control and which still therefore carries the power to subvert or overthrow the established system.
The contempt and condescension polite society pours onto its sluts and spinsters disguises the primal emotion at the root of all misogyny: fear. And that fear is visited every day on women, who pay with their lives for having sexualities that elude patriarchal control. Trans women; sex workers, who have a 45 to 75 percent chance of experiencing sexual violence at their jobs; lesbian and bisexual women, who experience sexual violence up to twice as often as straight women, including “corrective rape,” the attempt to bring them back into the heterosexual fold by force.29
For every imaginary femme fatale using her sexuality as a weapon of male destruction, there is a real woman who’s been raped by a boyfriend or groped by her boss; for every heartless mermaid drowning her lover or deceptive siren luring him to crash on the rocks, there is a woman whose life has been stalled or limited or ended by a man. It’s easy to think you’ll be the mermaid; to identify with the fairy bride, who can forbid men to touch her or look at her, and forget the human wife, brutalized and tortured and burned for showing a forbidden glimmer of autonomy. But we are all more likely to be the rule than the exception. We are all more likely to be dead sluts than Final Girls.
Women who do try to fight back against male violence are often subject to the worst extremes of that violence, particularly if they are women of color: Marissa Alexander, sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison for firing a single gunshot into her own ceiling to scare off her abusive husband. Rose Parker, convicted of murder for shooting her abusive ex-boyfriend after he’d raped her and held her prisoner for several days. Cyntoia Brown was sixteen years old when she ran away from home and was trafficked into sex work by an abusive pimp; out of desperation, she killed a man who’d paid $150 to rape her. Brown was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison. The convictions of Alexander, Parker, and Brown were overturned after mass outcry, but for every story like this you know, there are hundreds or thousands you don’t: in one California prison study, 93 percent of women who were imprisoned for killing a partner had been physically abused by the “victim.”30 And black women—Alexander, Parker, and Brown were all black—are twice as likely as white women to be incarcerated.31
Which is not to say we can’t occasionally find other scapegoats. Aileen Wuornos, who became famous as “America’s first female serial killer,” was a queer, working-class white woman and a sex worker. She died because she shot seven men, all of whom she insisted had tried to rape her. One of them, Dick Humphreys, was a retired police chief, which—anecdotally, at least—made it more likely that Wuornos was telling the truth; sex workers report high rates of assault from the police. (It also, probably, made Wuornos’s execution inevitable. The system is not kind to cop-killers.) Another victim, Richard Mallory, had in fact been convicted of “assault with intent to rape”—he broke into a woman’s house, groped her, and tried to rip her shirt off—and had served time in a psychiatric facility in lieu of prison.32 At her first trial, in tears, Wuornos testified that Mallory had raped her anally, poured saline solution up her ass to make the wounds sting, and threatened to kill her and rape her dead body, all before she even thought of striking back: “I’ve gotta fight or I’m gonna die,” she remembered thinking.33
So she fought, and died for fighting. In a system that is not designed to defend women, self-defense never works. When Wuornos was executed, in October 2002, she carried no fewer than six death sentences. Nick Broomfield, a director who made two documentaries about Wuornos, notes that she was punished more harshly than even some of the most infamous male killers. In fact, just over a year after Wuornos’s execution, in December 2003, Gary Ridgway—the most prolific serial killer in American history, who admitted to killing at least forty-nine women—was sentenced to life in prison. Ridgway’s victims, as it happens, were mostly sex workers. (He also raped their corpses after the fact. Apparently it’s a common fantasy.) Washington, where he was captured, was a death penalty state at the time; the judge could have killed Ridgway, but declined to do so, just as Florida could have given Wuornos a life sentence, but condemned her to die half a dozen times. If you want to understand our sexual state of play, start with the fact that a man who kills half a hundred female sex workers is shown more mercy than a female sex worker who defends herself against seven men.
Stories about deceptive, frightening, all-powerful female sexuality were created to justify male violence. They cannot provide us with an escape from it. Genuine sexual freedom and power, for women, is as unimaginable as the surface of another planet. Maybe our descendants will set foot there. But we may never see its sunlight or breathe its air. Yes, there is a primal, feral, alien power in female sexuality before society arises to contain and control it. But that feral quality rarely survives for long. It is beaten out of us, or starved out, or simply hidden away so we can be the kind of women the world tells us are worth loving. For many of us, sexual freedom is only a stop on the way to our final destination: the great domestication, the marriage that is meant to be our happy ending and instead turns out to be our end.
4.
MARRIAGE
It’s all about a girl who marries a man, and what do you think? He’s got six wives buried in the cellar.
—Gaslight (1944)
From the beginning, Laci Peterson’s death was cinematic. She disappeared on Christmas Eve 2002. She was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant. Her husband claimed she had gone out to walk the dog—an actual golden retriever, if you can believe it—and never came back. The first sign of her death looked like a shot from a Lifetime movie; the neighbors saw the dog at the Peterson’s front door, leash dragging behind it, unharmed but alone.
Laci was beautiful, outgoing, popular, a devoted wife and homemaker; one of the key pieces of evidence in her murder trial rested on the precise air date of a Martha Stewart segment about meringue.* Her husband, Scott, was handsome and charismatic—in fact, he looked almost exactly like a blander, frattier version of mid-2000s golden boy Ben Affleck. Both were white and middle class, making their pain an easy pitch to the media; Laci would soon be one of the nation’s most famous cases of “missing white woman syndrome,” in which one white woman’s disappearance is covered as a national story while the kidnappings, assaults, and deaths of women of color go comparatively unreported. The pathos of their situation—Laci’s pregnancy had been hard-won; the Petersons were just about to go in for fertility treatments when she found out that she was pregnant—combined with the star quality of its leads to make it a blockbuster.
“You’ve got a beautiful young woman! She’s pregnant! She’s missing the day before Christmas! And it really captured the attention of America,” says defense attorney and legal analyst Michael
Cardoza in one of the many, many, many true-crime documentaries about the case. “People begin to watch, and wonder: What’s going to happen?”1
In April 2003, the body of Laci’s fetus washed onto the
shore of San Francisco Bay. It had a deep cut, and plastic knotted around its neck. Laci washed up a day later. She had been decapitated. Her arms were gone from the elbow down; one foot was severed at the ankle, and the other at the knee. (Experts later said this was probably a sign that weights had been tied to her wrists and ankles; she hadn’t been dismembered, but parts of her had rotted off.) Most of her organs—and presumably, her fetus—had washed out into the bay.
By that time, the identity of her killer was a foregone conclusion. A few weeks after Laci’s disappearance, a woman named Amber Frey had come forward to the police, saying that her boyfriend, Scott—who had told her he was never married—was the same man as Scott Peterson, the man with the famously missing wife, whom she’d seen on the news. Frey also said that a few weeks before Christmas, Scott had changed his story about being married.
“I’d asked if he had ever been married, and he said no. I’d asked if he had any kids, and he said no,” Frey recalls. “But now he’s telling me he lied, and that he had been. And this would be his first holidays without her.”2
Frey let the police tap her phone. In one conversation—soon leaked to the press—Peterson airily tells Frey that he’s sorry he can’t see her, but he’s in Paris, enjoying the New Year’s celebration at the Eiffel Tower.