Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters stirs the pot on a profound question: What does it mean to be human? Gender is at the center of Zimmerman’s analysis, and the book is part memoir, part look-back at the ancient Greek myths that have filtered into contemporary thought.
It’s an engaging parsing that addresses the ways that sexism and misogyny constrain women, a provocative weaving of the personal and the political.
“Monsters are created in the difference between what we are supposed to be and what we are.”
Zimmerman, an editor, essayist, and occasional fiction writer, begins by introducing a group she calls “sister monsters.” There is Scylla, a six-headed beast with snake legs, a pack of dogs ready to lunge from her crotch. There’s the Sphinx, hovering over male victims with an unanswerable riddle, forcing them to beg for their lives, and Medusa, a grimacing, sharp-toothed creature with a protruding tongue, eager to pounce.
Other monsters include Circe, a sorceress who can turn men into pigs, and Charybdis, a whirlwind who can swallow men whole. Another batch, called the Sirens, have women’s heads atop bird bodies and sing in clusters. Their goal? To entice sailors into murky waters to drown.
"Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology," by Jess Zimmerman
Zimmerman argues that these terrifying models of female menace—so deeply ingrained that they’re largely unconscious—have tainted how Western societies see women. Mixed messages abound: Women are expected to be “seductive but pure, quiet but not aloof, fragile but industrious, and always, always small. We must not be too successful, too ambitious, too independent, too self-centered.” If we are, we are dubbed grotesque, unnatural.
There’s ample evidence of this. Worse, as Hillary Clinton, Megan Rapinoe, and members of the so-called Squad in Congress that includes Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can attest, the relentless hammering of these messages can be brutal. One need only look to the existence of incels, involuntarily celibate men who blame women for their lack of sexual success to see that heteronormativity and misogyny are alive and flourishing.
Add in the backlash to the #MeToo movement, the tenacity of “rape culture,” and the continued presence of male-led anti-abortion protesters outside virtually every reproductive health center in the country, and it is obvious that, when women attempt to assert their personhood, many men are threatened.
This is something that Zimmerman, like most people who identify as women, has personally encountered, and her honest assessment of her own self-silencing and near self-negation to accommodate the requests of a demanding male partner is resonant. Her confessional explication of relationship failures is raw, painful, and troubling.
And although Zimmerman understands that the “concept of ugliness has attached itself to race, class, disability, anything that veers from the self-appointed mainstream,” this intellectual understanding offers her little solace when she peers into the mirror and hates what she sees. These revelations are important, however anecdotal.
Still, like the hungry Charybdis, I wanted more from Women and Other Monsters, a deeper dive into how feminists can challenge—and organize against—hoary, but subtle, gradations of monster-dom that posit women as inferior thinkers, emotional ditzes, and hysterical shrews. After all, it is these stereotypes that are commonly used to lock women in place, making those who are loud, proud, large, or flamboyant seem like anomalies.
In the book’s conclusion, Zimmerman calls on readers to “gestate dissent and deviation” against this enduring monster, and to celebrate diversity as a social good. “Monsters are created in the difference between what we are supposed to be and what we are,” she writes. “[O]ur instinct is to hide, a sort of permanent confinement. But what if we labored, instead, to nurture all these deviations, all these insufficiencies—to rear them into viable creatures and send them out into the world?”
Indeed, imagine how freeing it would be if we put gender on a continuum and respected its every expression: Not male. Not female. Just human.