Content warning: Mentions of sexual assault (subheading “archetypes”, paragraph 5); mentions of trans antagonism (subheading “archetypes”, paragraph 7); mentions of misogynoir (subheading “archetypes”, paragraph 8); mentions of anti-Black racism and the lynching of Emmet Till (subheading “carolyn bryant donoham”, paragraph 1).
We have been introduced to plenty of dangerous women, I am sure. From well-written female villains, to mean girls, to bitchy bosses, to gold-diggers, women can be narrativized as fully-capable of cunningness and deviance. I am perfectly comfortable with these tropes existing alongside their counter-parts, like well-written heroines, and good girls, and doting mothers, and simple women untouched by greed. These women are all equally realistic so long as they are all equally represented.
My problem with the dangerous woman is not so much that she exists, but that we keep talking about her while making use of women who are, in fact, not inherently dangerous, or by ignoring women who actually are. The dangerous woman is not a myth; she's just not who we think she is.
the archetypes
If I were to compile a list of the kinds of women that are most-commonly portrayed as dangerous, it would look something like this:
The femme fatale is a dangerous woman.
The female sex worker is a dangerous woman.
The queer woman is a dangerous woman.
The trans woman is a dangerous woman.
The Black woman is a dangerous woman.
I use the word “dangerous” here loosely, because that danger is determined by how these women effectively endanger larger social structures. These are the lessons we have been taught, one way or another, and these are the things that we must actively unlearn.
Sexually empowered women like the femme fatale are written as dangerous because of the injury they add to men’s egos; what comes to mind for me is Hemingway’s illusive Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises (tldr; an ex-WWI-soldier’s PTSD gives him erectile dysfunction so he can’t get it up for his promiscuous love interest). She is dangerous because she’s been divorced twice. She is dangerous because she chooses sex. Most importantly, she is dangerous because she embodies the freedom of choice.
Even when a woman at the intersection of sex and womanhood is empowered, like Julia Robert’s Vivian in Pretty Woman, she is still seen as dangerous for women—again, like Julia Robert’s Vivian in Pretty Woman . Between classist discrimination in the shops on Sunset Boulevard, and the almost-rape by her sugar-daddy’s lawyer, we understand her position as a sex worker as being responsible for these incidents, not the assailants themselves. Moreover, Vivian wants an ending like “Cinder-fucking-rella”, and Cinderella does not fuck for cash. Even more pitifully, we have Keisha Knight Pulliam’s portrayal as Candace in Tyler Perry’s Medea Goes to Jail. As a sex worker character, Candace makes a terrible decision (being forced into sex work), leads a terrible life (continuing sex work voluntarily), wears a terrible wig (presumably to convince the audience she’s in sex work), and only serves as a damsel in destress whose life is turned around by the hero/love-interest. Once again, the sex worker is dangerous not to but for women.
There are so many direct and ambiguous references to the woman-loving-woman as dangerous that it’s hard to pick just one (they mostly exist as guest appearances in crime dramas, or as supernatural, life-draining creatures). If you watched You , though, then you should remember Peach, the maybe-bisexual-maybe-not-bisexual character who is obsessive and possessive over her best friend, Beck. Or maybe you watched The Roommate, where the dangerous-obsessive-bisexual Rebecca is the only plot line of the film. If you read the parentheses above, you will not be surprised to know that vampires have the privilege of being queer and visible, like in the earliest vampire story Carmilla, where the teenage daughter of an Austrian veteran, Laura, befriends the titular character, only for the latter to reveal herself as a vampire that has been following and feeding off of Laura since childhood. Carmilla, too, is possessive, greedy, and dangerous, and in the end, like Peach, like Rebecca, she is killed.
If we look to film again, the trans woman is the villain even when she’s not really present. When I say this, I think of horror films like Psycho, or Silence of Lambs, and other depictions of cross-dressing men (we could easily talk about Tyler Perry’s character of Medea here, too). Which is to say: this is the height of transphobic representations of the trans woman as dangerous; through depictions of dangerous cis men dressed as women. In real life, in the public bathroom, and in other private-but-public places, trans and non-binary people continue to be marked as this threat when they are in fact the targets in these spaces. You should be thinking of the U.S. bathroom ban, or the U.S. military ban, both orchestrated by President Trump. Trans women continue to be constructed as dangerous in almost every narrative, despite the fact that their lives are the most engendered by cis men, and not the other way around.
While I had no intention of this becoming a report on everything wrong with Tyler Perry’s narrative lens in film, I must include him and the character (or, caricature) of Medea once more. Perry’s Medea is the epitome of “the angry Black woman”, even if only in parody. I mean, the film is called Diary of a Mad Black Woman; what else is that supposed to mean? Either Medea’s mad because she’s angry, or she’s mad because she’s crazy, and either way, Perry’s trope of the mad Black woman is the butt of the joke that is this series. There is no reclamation for this trope, for this woman he continues to play. She exists to be laughed at and feared, simultaneously.
I do not mean for us to end here, and I do not have the space for us to get into a meaningful discussion of the ways in which these dangerous women archetypes are used and abused in media and pop-culture, either. Each of these women I have mentioned deserve their own posts, their own platforms, their own un-doings to deal with their respective false portrayals. What I mean to do here is to instead critique a dangerous woman who is routinely and intentionally left out of these cautionary tales, despite her historical reputation: the white woman.
the real thing
I remember having a conversation with a professor once about white women. We were, at the time, talking about a white woman scholar who had renamed herself something like Starhawk, and how white women like her are allowed to take up Indigenous-like names, or Wiccan practices, and are still given the platform to speak and be heard in ways that truly Indigenous women never have. The words I remember her saying were: “White women can be dangerous . . . white women can be so dangerous.”
I believe this is what she meant by that.
carolyn bryant donoham
Bryant Donoham is the white woman who effectively killed 14-year-old Emmett Till when she accused him of whistling at her and touching her in 1955. I use this vague accusation of touching because the story has been altered by the accuser on more than one occasion. Bryant Donoham’s versions include, in order: to her husband, the initial claim that Emmet Till had insulted her (how is not clear) and whistled at her; to the court trail, the detailed account of Emmett Till grabbing her waist and telling her he had been with other white women before, and later whistling at her; to the FBI, five years later, the story was that he had touched her hand; and in 2017 to Dr. Timothy B. Tyson, a professor who published on the death of Emmet Till, she said, on the accounts of Emmett Till touching her and speaking to her crudely: “that part is not true.”
She has admitted—though, only the one time—that her accounts of what happened in the store were not true. He did not touch her. He did not make a pass at her. He may not even have whistled at her. This, it seems, still does not confirm for us what truly happened that day. And what others have already made clear is that, regardless of how much truth there had been to her story, Emmett Till did not deserve to die as he did that day, at the age of fourteen, at the hands of two white men.
What I would like to call your attention to is the underplayed power of the words of a white woman. Understand that this was not some progressive response of believing women. This was racism; a vile excuse bundled up in a seemingly distressed petticoat. And while we have to acknowledge that it was her husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law J. W. Milam, who stole that little boy from his family and tortured him to death, it was Carolyn Bryant Donoham’s accusation that put him in that position. It was her words that killed him.
sarah palin
This example may seem irrelevant. Rather, Palin may seem irrelevant to you entirely, and for the most part she is. I choose to write about her here, however, because I believe she represents a host of dangerous women that we have brushed off as irrelevant without considering how that dismissiveness grants them even more power to be dangerous right under our noses.
If you did not know, Palin began inciting her supporters in 2010 on gun control with what would become her slogan: “Don’t Retreat; Reload”.The following year, she would design a campaign poster that set her lawmaking opponents as targets in the crosshairs. One of those targets was Representative Gabby Giffords, and a month later, Giffords would become one of the many injured survivors in a shooting targeted at her.
While Palin could never be linked to partaking in this shooting, or be held responsible for this shooting as a result of her literal words, this line of thinking still assumes that words lack power. That campaign slogan—Don’t Retreat, Reload—does not explicitly tell anyone to lead a mass shooting, but we have to acknowledge that it does. We have to acknowledge that her words were, “Don’t Retreat, Reload”. Reload should mean what, to the person who looks to Palin for advice on combatting gun-control laws? Is it truly metaphorical, in a conversation about “a right to bare arms”? Can these words ever just be words, when there are bullets that speak for them? No, Sarah Palin does not speak for her party, and no Sarah Palin did not tell the shooter to fire at eighteen people and kill six. But her words did.
kaitlin bennett
Bennett has made a name for herself over the internet in the last few years. You might remember her as the white girl who showed up to her university graduation ceremony with an automatic rifle strapped to her back. If we were to discuss her no further than this, I ask you to imagine just how many other categories of being could get away with attending their graduation with a weapon of this caliber and come out of it alive. My imagination is hardly so expansive.
As to what makes her dangerous, there is a video I am thinking of where Bennet attempted to disrupt a pride event sometime last year. She was disturbing the people celebrating queerness so that she could “interview” them—of course, if you have seen her interviews before, you will know them to be mostly about shit-stirring than having an actual, productive conversation. In the video, an officer approached is asking her to leave the premisses, or to leave behind her recording gear if she wishes to enter. You can watch the encounter here, but I will transcribe some key dialogue between Bennet and the unnamed officer below:
Cop: “You’re free to do whatever you like—”
Bennett: “But I will have consequences if I go in there and engage in free speech!”
She appears to understand her position as someone who has a right to free speech—this, however, is not the same as a right to not face consequences for her actions. Free speech has never meant absolving the speaker from criticism or consequence.
What many Twitter users have pointed out is the way that Bennett’s voice changes. Usually, her “interviews” are conducted with the confidence of this inquisitive-privileged position she occupies: she asks questions that are meant to lead to few answers outside of what she is willing to hear, and more importantly, she asks questions meant to undermine or invalidate the person she is questioning. (For example: her transphobic inquisition of asking strangers on a college campus if they cared about more inclusive bathrooms. You may read about it here, and watch snippets on Kat Blaque’s YouTube channel here.) Yet in the pride video, in the face of authority, Bennett becomes pleading and doe-like. She is woefully aware of the officer’s lack of sympathy for her cause. As one user put it: “the white woman in distress game isn’t working (and) her brain is shorting out.”
amy cooper
You have most likely heard of Amy Cooper, as one more name in a league of many Karens. She was the white woman filmed last May in Central Park who to called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black bird-watcher. Her reason for calling them? She was asked to put her dog on its leash, as park rules dictate. (And no, these two are not related. It’s just an odd coincidence.)
This video is disturbing on multiple layers. Visually, Amy Cooper takes her frustration out on her dog, its neck wrung and hung with the grip she seems to be loosing on reality. As she paces back and forth before Christian Cooper’s phone camera, her dog is dragged along with her, attempting to keep its balance and its breath on its hind legs. For a lot of viewers, this seemed to be the most upsetting portion of the video; it should not have been. Of course, for a lot of those viewers, they were not Black.
Her defence becomes: “I’m going to tell [the police] that there’s an African-American man threatening my life.”
It is at this point in the video where Amy Cooper’s actions become especially disturbing, when she is on the phone with 911: it’s the the tone change, again. As the dog continues to wheeze and whimper, her register goes from frustrated but controlled to breathless and hysterical. Suddenly, it’s “please, hurry!” and “I don’t know!”
Cooper is simply another version of Bennett, just without the same documented history that Bennett has intentionally created for herself. What sets them apart is how Cooper appears to out-right acknowledge that she knows exactly what she is doing. She blatantly understands her own word power as a white woman standing across from a Black man. Alternatively, Bennet has other plans; she intends to remain the pleading voice of the helpless white woman on the phone. She intends to maintain a pleasant façade of ignorance to those she gaslights on camera. These women are eerily similar, and equally dangerous. They both know what they are doing, and what they are saying as they do it.
defining dangerous
Danger will always be subjective, I believe. Shrimp is a delicacy for you, but could send me into anaphylactic shock. While this anecdote about my shellfish allergies is trivial in this conversation, it is true that what harms one of us does not harm all of us, and yet that harm is no less harmful. What I would like this to become is an opportunity for some of us to reflect on what position we may have previously understood a white woman to occupy in a line-up of dangerous things before reading this. Truthfully, what I would like the white women reading this to consider is how many times you may have spoken without realizing the weight of your words—and how many times you may spoken with that weight fully realized. Most importantly, I hope that you ask yourself: what steps are you willing to take from now on to take on that weight for others?
further learning:
Disclosure (Netflix): For more on the villainization of trans bodies. They specifically bring up transphobic images in pop culture, including the trans woman/cross-dressing man killer trope in Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.
Roxanne Gay, “Morality of Tyler Perry”, Bad Feminist: on Tyler Perry’s culture of misogynoir in film.
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