Attack of the Monster Women

In my gender class, we list monstrous women on the board.   Defining what is monstrous is really about defining what is normal.  Women have always had their bodies policed by the monstrous other—the not fully human woman, the monstrously large woman, and the most dangerous of all, the woman with the vagina that will destroy you.

The hybrid woman has always haunted our collective conscious and forced women to behave: Harpies, Medusa, even, until Disney cleaned up her image, the monstrously fishy and sexually seductive mermaid.  These animal/human hybrids mark certain female bodies as inhuman.  In our current culture, Nadya Suleman becomes Octomom, half human, half baby machine and even Tea Party darling Sarah Palin becomes a Mama Grizzly bear or a pit bull with  lipstick.

In addition to the half-human, half-animal monster women are the women who are too big. We cower before the monstrously large women who take up too much space.  This is why we are bombarded weekly by gossip rags that feature stars at the beach with fat rolls. It is why we hang on every pound Oprah gains or looses.  It is why even if you’re “fit” and a body builder, if you’re female you’re considered monstrously large.

But this week’s news brought us the most frightening monster of all—the woman with a dangerous vagina. Two stories illustrate this point—despite their separation by class and geography.

Melissa Lee Williams, 43, of West Virginia, demanded that either her ex-husband or his friend perform oral sex on her.  The ex-husband declined, but his friend, Adam Watson, agreed until he apparently became overwhelmed by her vaginal odor and declined.  At this point, Ms. Williams allegedly pulled a knife on the men demanding that someone perform the act or they were going to get their throats slit.

Over at feministing, Rose tries to focus on the case as  about sexual assault.  But Rose also points out that the bulk of the news coverage focused on the woman’s appearance and the “horrible odor” emanating from her vagina.  The fact that all three people were intoxicated when the police showed up and Williams was naked from the wait down only solidifies that this is a story about class abjection.

A world away from, a wealthy British man is about to marry an attractive and much younger woman.   Nothing monstrous there except that the man, Charles Kane, had a sex change from male to female and then back again.  At first he was thrilled to be a beautiful female, the gorgeous interior designer Samantha Kane, who was so hot she dated a wealthy Moroccan and lived a “jet set lifestyle.” But over the years Samantha started to feel less real and she decided to transition back to male.

The problem is that Charles’ penis is, of course, still kinda (a surgically constructed) vagina, leaving us with all sorts of jokes and snide remarks in the press like “He’s not the man he used to be” and this anxious headline “Does This Look Like The Face Of A Dude Who Turned Into A Chick But Then Back Into A Dude So He Could Marry A Chick?”

The monstrosity of Melissa Lee Williams is easily located not in her vagina, but in her rural, white, poor, and therefore “ugly” self.  But the anxiety over a person being able to marry as a dude who might still have a vagina or something in between a penis and a vagina is evidence that there is something deeper, something fishier if you will, than the regular forms of social power at play.

That something is the monstrous vagina—the dangerous vagina that will harm you in some way with its desires—the vagina dentata. The horror at the vagina is so deeply rooted in both Western religions and consumer capitalism that we invent products to control its smell, perform cosmetic surgery to make it “prettier,” wax it, even vjazzle it (i.e. decorate it with pretty crystals).  We make horror films about the dangers lurking down there even as we celebrate the vagina as the central image of the pornographic imagination.

But even all gussied up, waxed, perfumed, fixed with cosmetic surgery and decorated with crystals in the shape of a butterfly, the vagina is always potentially monstrous—diseased, aggressive, unreal, destructive, deadly.  And it is this monster that haunts our cultural imaginary.