The (Feminist) Empire Strikes Back

EDITOR’S NOTE: We know, we know — we said The Flytrap wouldn’t launch until Election Day. But our Kickstarter popped off so fast that we got really excited about publishing some early bonus content just to test things out. And while free subscriptions are technically available here on Beehiiv, our Kickstarter has the hottest deals on subscriptions, and we extremely encourage folks to pledge + subscribe over there for now.

Flytrap Fridays will run here on the blog, free for everyone to read, until Election Day. Think of it as a little ~ amuse bouche ~ for the Flytrap-curious. In our first edition, Flytrap co-founder s.e. smith brought us spooky-season goodness with “The Pumpkins of Fir Street.” Then, Tina Vásquez penned a moving reconsideration of “Roseanne.” In upcoming editions, we’ll be appreciating the freaky feminism of CBS’ “Evil,” and unpacking why evangelicals love to hate Halloween. Today, we’re pleased to bring you an essay on female villains — real, imagined, and purported — from Nicole Froio.

If you’ve existed as a woman for enough time on this Earth, chances are at some point you will become the villain in someone else’s story. 

Maybe it’s because you left a toxic or abusive relationship that was ruining your life and now post-breakup, your ex blames you for derailing his life. Perhaps a beloved employee at work regularly made you uncomfortable, so you spoke out against them and they got fired. It might be because you’re low on energy and say no to requests for care from people who expect it—placing boundaries around these kinds of expectations tends to shatter relationships. 

In a world where feminism now serves the demands of capitalism and has been overtaken by algorithms and corporate nods to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the origins of female villainy are—at this point—well understood. That any woman can be villainized for saying no to a request or for reacting to disrespectful treatment has to do with misogyny and sexism, of course. In film and TV, selling a woman’s turn toward villainy is highly profitable. 

Women becoming evil—driven mad because of the patriarchy—has become its own genre of sorts. And I eat that shit up. Please press play on Promising Young Woman (2020) if I ever come over. I will die on the hill that Maleficent (2014) is a tale about surviving and avenging domestic violence, and that our heroine never did anything wrong. How can I blame Harley Quinn for being driven mad by the Joker when he simply dropped her out of nowhere, leaving her to be killed by all of her enemies? I have nothing but respect for the ghost in the Guatemalan version of La Llorona (2019), an indigenous woman who haunts her colonizer and genocidaire when he is found innocent in court of terrorizing her village. 

In a world where womanhood itself puts us on the receiving end of unthinkable violence, violations, abuse, and even murder, female revenge is so delicious and satisfying. As girls and women, we are often socialized to minimize our needs and to remain silent when someone does something to us that we don’t like. We are supposed to be pleasant and accommodating, have a sweet disposition no matter what, and understand other people’s struggles to a self-detrimental degree. Being cast as evil, bad-mouthed, and vicious can be liberating when you’ve been taught to be sweet and demure. 

In the digital realm, female villainy takes shape in “I’m in my villain era” memes across Instagram and TikTok, where women post about finally setting boundaries and cutting toxic people out of their lives. Many of these posts unpack what it feels like to set boundaries when you don’t have much experience doing so. A video of Doctor Doom unmasking himself as Robert Downey Jr. to uproarious applause is captioned: “Me (a recovering people pleaser) entering my villain era (I set a boundary in the nicest, most respectful way and still felt guilty after).” In another, a woman looks at the camera and lip syncs a robotic voice saying, “Feel free to tell everyone that I’m the monster in your story—don’t forget to mention in which chapter you created me.” In one popular post, a woman tells her audience that to enter your villain era, you must be ruthless with yourself and those around you. 

This trend speaks to how women setting boundaries is so counter to female socialization that it feels like an act of villainy—both to women themselves and to the people around them. To be a woman is to be expected to acquiesce, or to be shunned when we don’t. In these videos, women and girls use villainy as an armor against misogynistic judgment, owning up to being “that selfish bitch” before anybody else notices. When men are called villains, it’s because they actually act and talk like villains. It’s because they are materially causing harm to the planet or to the people around them. Meanwhile, women feel guilt for owning up to their wants and needs.

I deeply relate to this phenomenon playing out on social media, and to the broader desire to have a harder exterior, a sort of armor that protects me from the expectations of womanhood. As a survivor of sexual violence, I have done years—so many years—of therapy to learn how to listen and actually act on my own needs. Binary gender socialization hasn’t helped any of us. My own ignorance about my boundaries and the world’s insistence that I must be submissive makes me feel like my boundaries are monstrous; that they are evils to contend with; that they are an inconvenience to everyone around me. If I don’t take on the extra work of considering others’ feelings over my own, people will suffer. For example, if I don’t smile at a random man who just hit on me, he will feel rejected. At 34, setting boundaries still feels like a dissenting act. I don’t know if it will ever feel completely comfortable in my body. 

But after the shock of becoming the villain, there’s the reward. The hours I get to rest instead of work when I say no to an assignment that’s badly paid. The peace that settles into my chest when I don’t take on additional labor. The cuddles I have with my wife and dog instead of going to an event a friend tried to guilt-trip me into attending. 

It’s all very personal, and as always, very political. 

Demanding More Than Empire Feminism 

When I consider my own supposed villainy, it’s easy to understand why female villainy and feminism go hand-in-hand. As feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed puts it in her book Living a Feminist Life, to point out a problem is to become a problem. Women often become villains when we say something isn’t okay, or when we point out there’s something wrong with bad behavior that is normalized in society. Most people prefer to live their lives without noticing the actual villainy of those in power they admire, cheering representation without demanding material changes: DEI at its worst. I have learned—under the tutelage of Ahmed and other feminist thinkers—that to be a feminist is to disrupt those cheers, no matter what, and to highlight exactly how we are being failed by those who purport to represent us and our values.

So, let’s do some disrupting. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about female villainy because of the U.S. presidential election, where most dissenting opinions about vice president and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris are dismissed as misogynistic. There’s no denying that misogynoir is at play in this election. Harris is criticized for not having biological children and for the way she dresses, and generally men don’t want to vote for her because she is a woman. To some, Harris is a villain because she is simply a Black and Asian American woman running for president.

But that’s not why Harris is a villain. Harris is a villain because she is running for president of one of the most evil empires in the history of the world. She is a villain because she is part of an administration that has supported Israel’s genocide on Palestinians. There are real reasons to call Harris a villain, but calling Harris a war criminal results in a lot of pearl-clutching from people who want to see her in the White House as president, who are invested in the narrative that a female president needs to be shielded from criticism. How could a woman who says she stands for equality and equity be a war criminal? How can it be that the best chance for the first female president of the United States is cast online as an evil villain? It can only be a case of misogyny, racism, and voters holding a woman to impossible standards, right?

This would be true if Harris’ critics called her evil for saying “no” to a cup of tea. For daring to set boundaries like so-called villains in their TikTok videos. But that’s not why she’s being characterized as evil by legitimate detractors. As said by the modern poet Lorde (not Audre; the one who sings “Royals”): “It’s just self-defense, until you’re building a weapon.” Harris is being called a war criminal by people across the U.S. because her administration has aided Israel in carrying out a genocide in Gaza and commiting thousands of war crimes against Palestinians over the last year. The political machinery of the U.S. understands the basics of feminism and gender-based oppression, so it’s very easy (and profitable) to conflate genuine criticism of Harris with the barrage of sexist and racist criticism the presidential hopeful receives. In a world where female villainy is as memeable as it is aspirational, it’s easy to construct propagandist narratives that rely on gender and race. We all recognize race and gender as discriminatory categories, so invoking them as a defense has been somewhat effective in shutting up legitimate critics on the left. This, we are told, is feminism. 

Audre Lorde did say that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. For those of us who view feminism as a politic that guides our values rather than a tool for obtaining power, it is necessary to point out that a woman, a Black woman, running for president of a violent empire isn’t actually feminism. But by naming the problem—U.S. involvement in genocide under an administration that claims to stand for human rights and equality—we become the problem: killjoys who disrupt the excitement people feel casting their vote potentially for the first woman president. 

The reason why this narrative about “killjoys” is often effective is because women are characterized as villains simply because of our womanhood. We are expected to act and acquiesce according to the norms of our gender. This is a visceral reality for many of us, and we often see ourselves reflected in propaganda that weaponizes these most tender parts of existing as women or as women of color. 

This is the ultimate problem with politics that claim to represent minorities: The reality of gender-based inequality—and the possibility that one woman will fix it by simply taking power—is used against us, continuously and grotesquely. Because we might feel represented by a politician who looks like us or has gone through similar struggles as us, we feel personally and morally implicated when others call attention to their evil deeds. The criticism of the politician makes us feel that our experiences are also being invalidated because we are encouraged to project ourselves onto that person. 

But I am not Kamala Harris, and neither are you. Most of us cannot even dream of the power the vice president of the United States wields.

It is feminist to discern between real feminism—the one that wants to shift structures; that wants to abolish patriarchy and capitalism; that wants safety and health for all women, including Palestinian women—and feminism that is being counted on to keep everything exactly as it is. It is a valid, evidence-based feminist critique to point out, more than a year into Israel’s genocide, that both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are war criminals. It is a feminist stance to highlight, whenever possible, that this administration’s military support of Israel has resulted in more than 42,000 preventable Palestinian deaths, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, a reliable reporting source according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights – yet not according to U.S. politicians and media alike. It is not misogynistic or racist to disrupt the Democratic narrative that Harris is being held to an impossible standard when decisions made by the current Democratic administration have resulted in thousands of murdered babies and children. 

The slogan “the personal is the political” became popular in the 1960s because second-wave feminists wanted to illustrate the personal and domestic dimensions of women’s subjugation. The relationship between the personal and the political hasn’t changed much in the sense that women and other dissenting genders still experience oppression and subjugation through personal interactions and settings. But establishment feminists have collapsed this connection discursively, making everything that is “personal” available for political or commercial marketing. We need to move beyond our perceived villain eras into an era of feminist discernment, joining the ranks of killjoys nationwide who are asserting that aiding a genocide is a hard boundary we cannot let any politician cross.

This piece was edited by Tina Vásquez and copy-edited by Christine Grimaldi.

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