Dear Impossible Readers,
Why are women so often portrayed as evil? Because they are not. Period.
I am not a feminist in the ideological sense. I believe in equality for everyone, regardless of their gender or sexuality. But I grew up with a grandfather who was unusually progressive for his time. He used to say: if all women wore trousers, there would be nowhere left in this world for men to stand.
He was not insulting women. He was recognising power.
Women are depicted as evil, dirty, or dangerous, not due to weakness, but because men have always known two things at once: that women are essential and that they cannot be completely controlled. This mix of dependence and fear has never led to generous storytelling.
This logic still holds today. When a woman slacks off at work, people are more likely to hire men afterwards, but when a man slacks off, we simply hire another bloke because this one will be different. How exactly does this logic work?
The same pattern extends upwards. Chaotic world politics is not just about geopolitics. It is a massive pecking order, governed by the same dominance logic that influences gender, labour, and power at all levels of society.
Throughout history and across different cultures, a common pattern endures: women are frequently blamed when things go wrong. Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Pandora released the contents of the jar. The witch prepared her potion. The shapeshifter altered her form. These tales are ancient, sacred to some, well-known to many, and deeply ingrained in societal explanations of themselves.
They did not occur by chance.
Historically, men held authority over storytelling. Myths, laws, and sacred writings emerged as societies aimed to impose order on a world riddled with uncertainty. Forces like fertility, birth, blood, sexuality, death, and transformation were unpredictable and uncontrollable. Women personified these forces. They experienced bodily changes, bleeding, and birth. Positioned at the cusp between beginnings and endings, between ongoing continuity and sudden rupture, their power was both majestic and unsettling.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas suggested that societies tend to classify things they cannot easily control as dangerous. In rigid systems, ambiguity is viewed as a threat. Women, inherently associated with ambiguity, often symbolise it. As a result, many narratives portray change as feminine and blame it accordingly.
Eve’s curiosity led to knowledge and exile, while Pandora’s curiosity caused suffering to spread. Both myths originated in societies that reinforced patriarchy, inheritance, and male lineage. Psychologist Erich Neumann referred to this as a cultural fear of the “Great Mother” archetype: the feminine as both creator and destroyer. Rather than accepting this complexity, these cultures portrayed feminine power as dangerous, tempting, or flawed.
This pattern appears in folklore, where women are more inclined than men to shapeshift into animals such as spiders, snakes, birds, or cats. These creatures are associated with the night, weaving, poison, and liminal spaces. Weaving was traditionally a woman’s task: storytelling became a tangible craft, with fate woven by hand. The spider symbolises both creator and trap, while shapeshifters represent survivors and threats. Silvia Federici notes that women known for knowledge, healing, midwifery, herbalism, and oral tradition were demonised during social change. Uncontrollable phenomena became sources of fear.
Psychologically, this phenomenon is projection. Historically, men exercised external power through law, force, and authority, while women wielded symbolic power associated with desire, life, and continuity. Societies projected fears such as chaos, mortality, temptation, and curiosity onto women and punished them through stories. This explains why women are often portrayed as temptresses, corruptors, or transformers, symbolising instability.
This pattern is not universal. When women share stories, interpretations evolve. In matrilineal or egalitarian cultures, women act as guides, teachers, and creators. Spider women craft worlds, and shapeshifting goddesses are playful, wise, and protective. Demonisation increases when male-dominated religious or political institutions formalise these stories, transforming oral traditions into a fixed canon.
These stories remain relevant because myths continue to shape perceptions, roles, and judgments today. Despite striving for equality in laws, work, and visibility, old blame narratives persist, depicting women as too curious, ambitious, disruptive, or excessive.
Modern retellings of ancient tales.
Questioning these myths does not undermine belief but explores the fears and significance behind them. The woman might not have been the actual issue, but a symbol of change, which always threatens those who want to maintain the status quo.
From the Garden of Eden,
Yours Possibly
Further Reading
Clifton, S.M., Hill, K., Karamchandani, A.J., Autry, E.A., McMahon, P. and Sun, G., 2019. Mathematical model of gender bias and homophily in professional hierarchies. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 29(2).
Douglas, M., 2003. Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge.
Eagly, A.H. and Karau, S.J., 2002. Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological review, 109(3), p.573.
Federici, S., 2004. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.
Formanowicz, M., Witkowska, M., Hryniszak, W., Jakubik, Z. and Cisłak, A., 2023. Gender bias in special issues: evidence from a bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics, 128(4), pp.2283-2299.
Götz, E., 2021. Status matters in world politics.
Graves, A.L., Hoshino-Browne, E. and Lui, K.P., 2017. Swimming against the tide: Gender bias in the physics classroom. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 23(1).
Haegele, I., 2024. The broken rung: Gender and the leadership gap. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07750.
Lin, A.Y.T., 2024. Contestation from below: status and revisionism in hierarchy. International Studies Quarterly, 68(3), p.sqae092.
MacDonald, P.K. and Parent, J.M., 2021. The status of status in world politics. World Politics, 73(2), pp.358-391.
McKinnon, M. and O’Connell, C., 2020. Perceptions of stereotypes applied to women who publicly communicate their STEM work. Humanities and social sciences communications, 7(1).
Neumann, E., 2015. The great mother: An analysis of the archetype. Princeton University Press.
Panerati, S., Moscatelli, S., Ruggieri, D., Menegatti, M., Ciaffoni, S., Mazzuca, S. and Rubini, M., 2025. Capturing Perceived Gendered Expectations in the Workplace: Development and Validation of the ‘Perfection Bias’ Scale. European Journal of Social Psychology.
Peng, A., Nushi, B., Kıcıman, E., Inkpen, K., Suri, S. and Kamar, E., 2019, October. What you see is what you get? the impact of representation criteria on human bias in hiring. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (Vol. 7, pp. 125-134).
Pireddu, S., Bongiorno, R., Ryan, M.K., Rubini, M. and Menegatti, M., 2022. The deficit bias: Candidate gender differences in the relative importance of facial stereotypic qualities to leadership hiring. British Journal of Social Psychology, 61(2), pp.644-671.
Subotić, J., 2025. The 19th-century ‘antiquities rush’and the international competition for cultural status. Review of International Studies, pp.1-16.
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