Sirens and Slaves

A woman’s use is limited to domestic partnership, childbearing and raising, and pleasurable amusement for men. A woman’s sole function is to ensnare, and marry, a witless male with her beauty, charm, and grace. A female is the yin to the male yang. A woman is only happy when she achieves acknowledgement of her loveliness and secures a man to adore and father her. Women need men to provide them with material things, financial stability, common sense, direction, and purpose.

Enter the femme fatale: the champion of the weaker sex; the Olympic competitor of the game known as subversion. She refuses to bend to social norms, displacing herself from the roles of housewife, caretaker, and mother. She is unrepentantly sexual and well endowed with adeptitude, charm, beauty, and determination.  She does whatever it takes to lure her prey into a cooperative state, tempting him with her beauty, coercing him with her charms. She may appear to be a desirable possession, but she ultimately proves to be the possession of no one.

She is an invention of men who, knee-deep in their insecurities, fear the powers that already lie within the hands of a beautiful woman. When the everyday, girl-next-door type can leave lasting heel-marks in even the most carefully guarded vascular organ, the fear of an even stronger woman is augmented to apoplectic heights. The image is exacerbated in fiction as the femme fatale, inferring that interaction with a dominant, powerful, and aggressive woman will inevitably result in only one conclusion: a man’s helpless – and grisly - demise.

The female has been portrayed in ugly, frightening ways many times in fiction and mythology. Take for instance the Sirens, who are half-woman and half-something-else-or-another. Ovid says a Siren’s face is that of a virgin.[1] This is a clear allusion to the male desire to have both a seductress and an inexperienced imbecile simultaneously: one to worship them; one to satisfy them. A Siren’s objective was to lure sailors to their death with their captivating melodies. Women – even today – are seen as “man traps” and little more than that. Fabulous poet, but otherwise chauvinist, Samuel Taylor Coleridge comments thusly: “The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.”[2] The legend addresses the similarly-limited facets of the sirens; “they were fated to die whenever a man did not fall under their spell.”¹ Men also consistently trend toward rejection of the entrapment of matrimony, lamenting the fate of any man who develops lasting bonds with a woman. Men constantly refer to the state of conjugality as one which can only be arrived at via trickery on the female’s part. Oscar Wilde notes, “Woman begins by resisting a man's advances and ends by blocking his retreat.”[3]

Ogden Nash once said, “I have an idea that the phrase ‘weaker sex’ was coined by some woman to disarm some man she was preparing to overwhelm.”[4] One tactic used by a femme fatale is the promise of a domestic life together (apparently greatly desired by the male victim); she offers the irresistible notion that you might own her someday. In Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (or, the merciless beauty), he meets a beautiful woman who sings to him, brings him food to eat, and makes love to him. She insinuates her desire to be domesticated and trained by him for his own pleasure in performing these tasks which are indicative of worship and submission. However, he comes to realize that he is dead, killed by the vixen/housewife he thought to possess. In this poem, the woman is highly romanticized by him, though with hardly a positive attribute to call her own; she hardly has a thought or even speaks more than “I love thee true.”[5] In essence, the feeling here – as it is in many works of fiction and romanticism of women – is that women are “perfect” when they possess beauty and submission, and have no other objective than to please their male counterparts. This image is horribly askew due to the writer’s insecurities about the female talents; however, it is consistently perpetuated throughout the ages and even throughout different cultures.

In the Korean culture, there is a preponderance of “fox women” in their fairy tales. Most are quite gruesome accounts of women who eat the men with which they come into contact, as well as their own families. They can transform from women to foxes and then back again. This, again, is highly indicative of the male phobia of female trickery. There is a Confucian saying: “Namjon Yobi,” which means, “Man high, woman low,” that is still promoted within Korean culture today.[6]

The fear of women has inspired many a soul-wrenching poem and shocking work of fiction, but it has rarely promoted equality nor has it expressed an accurate portrayal of women as whole individuals. The femme fatale, though preferable to the domesticated housewife, is still an egregious perversion of female liberation. Unfortunately, this dichotomy is the standard across the world. She must be destined for slavery or villainy. She is a fox or a virgin; a whore or a saint. Women are incapable of having personalities, being disagreeable, having interests unrelated to the engagement of a man, and simultaneously being attractive. Perhaps this trend of thinking should be reevaluated and men should examine their conscience – and the proofs of reality – before creating such depthless characters who want for nothing more than the destruction of men. Perhaps such characters are detrimental to both women and men, causing both to be directed toward the extremes instead of pursuing the merit of the realistic female personality.

But it's useless to make such a suggestion to Adam.
He has turned himself into God, who is faultless, and doesn't exist.[7]