Last week, I posted this reel. I did this because the popular TV show Furious reminded me of an essay I wrote for The Rumpus back in 2019 called The Fantasy of the Femme Fatale. 

Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black as she pursues a woman serial killer Catherine Grace who murders the men who exploited her and her best friend when they were trafficked as teenage girls. I enjoyed watching the show, but when the first episode revealed a petite and lovely woman as a prolific serial killer, an exasperated sigh escaped me. I couldn't help it. 

I don't know if you know this – and I fear most people don't – but women are only 8.6% of known U.S. serial killers. However, they appear frequently in popular media. I wrote an essay about this phenomenon seven years ago, but I have not noticed this trend dying down. Not even a little bit. 

What fascinates me about the discrepancy between the reality of women's relationship to violence and the fictionalized stories about their relationship to violence is the fact that women write these stories, AND women consume them. We women are hungry to see women kill, even though so few of us do. 

Watching Furious, I got the distinct impression that the question Elizabeth Meriweather was trying to answer is: how do women metabolize violence and victimization? I am similarly fascinated by this question. Again and again, I find myself watching shows or reading books about this topic. Many of them land on the same conclusion: Women metabolize violence by turning it around on men. FUCK YEAH!

Gillian Flynn's book Sharp Objects (which was then made into an HBO miniseries starring Amy Adams) features the queen bee of fantastical fictional women serial killers: the popular and pretty teen girl who is secretly a sadistic psychopath. To explain why Amma turned homicidal, her older sister Camille, the narrator and protagonist, blames their mother's abuse.

"A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”

I think of this line all the time. It's so poetic and pithy and punchy. Hats off, Gillian!

But the idea behind it is just not true. Women make up 14% of violent offenders. We make up 51% of the population. In spite of the violence we experience, we don't inflict it on other people. We drink more than our fair share of poison, and we don't spit it back out.

While these statistics might disappoint those of us who want reciprocal justice, I think they suggest some unanswered questions: What do women do with all this poison? Through watching and reading revenge fantasies? How do we cope with the disparity between what we consume and how we live? I want to read stories that attempt to answer these.