I was watching a snippet of a bad sci-fi movie on Youtube last night and the scene started with the main character, a man, making out with a scantily dressed woman. Yet just as they’re about to strip off their clothes and get down to it, the woman reveals herself to be an evil cyborg and so the main character pulls out a gun and blows two large holes in her head. Today, I was checking out the art of Paul Maybury (which I like, though he’s obviously heavily influenced by Paul Pope and Sam Hiti) and there were a few pages from a Conan comic and the same kind of scene occurred: just as Conan and the woman are starting to get intimate, she reveals herself to be a bloodthirsty monster, so he kills her. This made me think of how often this trope is used (the most memorable for me is in Wicked City). I’m not talking about monster women in general; I mean the specific plot device of having a woman who seems sexually available turn out to be a flesh tearing monster and the man then killing her. Obviously, this happens literally in horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, but the same basic trope appears in crime noir and spy fiction where a seemingly sympathetic woman reveals herself to be the main character’s enemy at the moment they are about to have sex, and instead of a petit mort there’s a grand mort.
The most common explanation for this is that it’s basic misogyny, that this pattern reveals a deep fear of female sexuality. While I can see that since this pattern displays an obvious lack of trust in women, I don’t think that’s a complete explanation. I think this trope is rooted in a fear of being vulnerable. If you are a heterosexual male, then that fear is projected onto women. In other words, I think this has to do with how masculinity is constructed.
Many people, such as Dr. William Pollack and Michael S. Kimmel, have pointed out that a large element in how masculinity is constructed in the U.S. is the fear of displaying emotion. Emotion is equated with weakness, which is also equated with being a woman. You can read the books by the people I link to above or you can just think back to your own playground experiences. Boys are ridiculed when they show any emotion. Any chink in the armor, any vulnerability, is immediately exposed by the other boys. So boys must be ever vigilant and repress the beginnings of any emotion. Obviously all this varies depending on one’s family, community, and biology, but it’s common enough that even mentioning it seems trite.
So I think this is what is at the root of this plot pattern in so many disparate works. In the trope, the male character is sexually aroused and is just about to get jiggy with the woman. Yet this puts the male character in a problematic position. To have sex, one has to vulnerable with another person. One has to display emotion. These are big no-nos in the über-male construction of gender. The only emotion a man is okay to exhibit is anger. And so the male character pulls out his sword, gun, knife, or hands instead of his dick and does the only thing a man is cool doing–killing. It’s not the woman he fears or her sexuality; it is his own potential vulnerability.
Part of what makes me want to analyze this is that I like drawing female monsters. It’s not exactly the same thing as what I mention above, but there’s a connection perhaps.
