Lady Killers

These are not names calculated to keep us up at night; they’re punch lines to the great overarching joke that is female aggression.

Nothing was more intolerable than a wealthy woman!

One stat that does get confirmed again and again in various studies is that the majority of serial killers, both male and female, are white.

Psychologists have theorized that we love separating ourselves from “evil” because it makes us feel good about ourselves: “Locating evil within selected individuals or groups carries with it the ‘social virtue’ of taking society ‘off the hook’ as blameworthy.”

“All that kills, wounds, withers was her first lot as an adventurous girl.”

ut Mother Earth is also a merciless destroyer whose wrath obliterates guilty and innocent alike.

It’s true: men spill most of the blood in history books.

We could ask ourselves, “Why do women kill?” But I think we might as well ask, “Why does anyone kill?”

Today, we remember the killer Erzsébet Báthory as a sexy vampire who bathed in virgin blood, which isn’t at all true, but it makes her less human, more myth—and in turn excuses us from asking uncomfortable questions like: if men are supposed to be the aggressors, why do Erzsébets exist?

It’s not that society doesn’t recognize the existence of evil in women, because women have been portrayed as conniving and malevolent and the bringers of the apocalypse since Eve ate the apple. But we seem to prefer evil women ensconced in our fiction.