Beware the Monstrous Woman, When the Feminine Turns Threatening

Happy Spooky Season, here are some 'monstrous' women, but what is 'monstrosity' anyway? AVAILABLE NOW! The Odyssey: a Modern Retelling. https://geni.us/TheOdysseyBook Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourhttps://www.mythsbaby.com/contactpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributionsmythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com slash group trip.

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• 1:23Liv Albert?

  You will come to the sirens, first of all. They bewitch any mortal who approaches them. If a man in ignorance draws too close and catches their music, he will never return to his fine wife and little children and see their joy at his homecoming. The high, clear tones of the sirens will bewitch him. They sit in a meadow. Men's corpses lie heaped up all around, moldering upon the bones as the skin decays. You must row past there. You must stop the ears of all your crew with sweet wax that you have needed, so that none of the rest may hear the song. But if you yourself are bent on hearing,

• 2:05Liv Albert?

  then give them orders to bind you both hand and foot as you stand upright against the mast stay with the rope ends tied to the mast itself. Thus, you may hear the two sirens' voices and be enraptured. If you implore your crew and beg them to release you, they must bind you fast with more bonds again.

• 2:52Liv Albert?

  Oh, hi there, beloved nerds. Welcome. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, that raving madwoman, Liv. You want to hear something wild? This month marks the 10th year of spooky season episodes of this podcast. 10 years. What? Naturally, it's had me thinking about all of the spooky season episodes of the past, all of the episodes I've released over the years. But more than anything, it had me thinking about that very first year of spooky Halloween. I started this podcast in July 2017, and by October that year, I was already launching into the first of so goddamned many spooky seasons. It was one of the few series of this show that just came,

• 3:37Liv Albert?

  like, completely fucking naturally the second it was October, because not only is Greek mythology filled with some of the most delightful and delightfully demented monsters, but I am a woman who, if presented with the opportunity to make something spooky or dramatize a bit of horror, I will grab that shit by the horns. And in the case of these monsters, maybe even literally, okay, they don't have horns, but if they did, that would have been a good joke. And one of the first episodes of spookiness that I ever created was what I called "The Monster Mash", where I laid out many of the more monstrous creatures of Greek myth. And gods was that fun. Some 10 years later, though, I've had to get a bit more creative with my spookiness

• 4:20Liv Albert?

  if I want to avoid just retelling the same stories over and over and over again, which sometimes I do, let's be real. But in this case, kind of new? Enter my beloved monsters. Something else, though, that's changed immensely over these 10 years is how I see some of these monsters, some very specific monsters, and how we, as a culture, imagine these very specifically gendered and sexualized monsters. So today, in honor of 10 years of spookiness, I'm revisiting a list of monstrous creatures, but with something more specific in mind. Because it's 2026. Because when monsters are not just explicitly gendered,

• 5:05Liv Albert?

  but are explicitly female monsters whose monstrosity is linked with their sexuality or their bodies, what does that say about the culture who created their mythos? Because spoilers, there are a good handful of so-called monsters whose ultimate monstrosity, as far as I can see it, is just the fact that men found them unable to resist, whether the monsters wanted it or not. And when those men could not resist, it led to their downfall. And truly, like, what does it say about a story when the monsters do no harm aside from being so-called seductive, bewitching, so-called irresistible? Is that really monstrosity, or is it projection?

• 5:49Liv Albert?

  A quick warning, though, before I dive deep into this episode. I did start writing this amongst another, like, three episodes while I was, I had like, three days before I was going to Greece, and I definitely thought I was going to get more monsters into this list. But I am leaving in a few hours and have to record a conversation before then. But gosh, guys, it's spooky, so you're going to be thrilled. And so either I just decided to record the script that I had already written for this episode, which is a little shorter than it would normally be. So either you will have a short episode today, or I will pack in some more with my terrible microphone after I have landed in Greece.

• 6:31Liv Albert?

  We'll see what it results, but just a heads up on that. That intro suggested I was going to get to a lot more monsters than I was capable of getting to in the time that I had. But that's because there's just so much going on into the ones I did get to. So here we are.

• 7:05Liv Albert?

  Beware the monstrous woman when the feminine turns threatening.

• 7:27Liv Albert?

  Are these female creatures monstrous? Or are they just fuckable and capable of defending themselves against their potential rapists? Let's see, shall we? Now, I won't pretend that this episode's theme is not heavily inspired by Medusa's story. It was researching her in such immense detail that really opened my eyes to just how many of these women are understood and what way, how they appear in the sources, and what that really says about both the ancient world and the modern one. But I also don't intend to make today's episode entirely about Medusa, because gods, have I spent a lot of time with her already? If you want to learn more, just search her name in your podcast app

• 8:11Liv Albert?

  and click on anything that I've done, because I am obsessed, and there are so many episodes. Instead, I want to use a simple recap of her story today and that of her sisters to just introduce this idea, this particular type of feminine monstrosity. The Gorgon sisters, Medusa more than the others, are some of the most famous and widespread so-called monsters in not just Greek mythology, but much of the wider Mediterranean, too. Their story is ancient, so ancient that the details and origins are very difficult to pick apart from everything that came later. Like, did the monstrous, snarling face of the Gorgon exist first? Or was it the story of three sisters living at the edge of the world?

• 8:56Liv Albert?

  The answer is probably somewhere in between, because sometimes those sisters look like that monstrous Gorgon, and sometimes they just look like human sisters. And it's important to remember that there is a kind of separation from the stories of the Gorgons and Medusa and the iconography of the Gorgon itself. The image of the Gorgon is everywhere, and I mean everywhere. It's in roof tiles and shields, it's in armor, accessories, and temple friezes. The Gorgon, the Gorgonion, as a concept, is, in a word, iconic. But the story, actually, is a bit more complicated and doesn't always match up with that iconography. The gist, you probably remember, goes like this. The three Gorgon sisters are the children of two sea gods,

• 9:41Liv Albert?

  Phorcus and Kito, both with ties to some sorts of monstrosity, but in appearance, more than actual danger. Kito, for her part, was the goddess of sea monsters, things like whales, dolphins, sharks. So there wasn't zero danger, but it wasn't about the gods being overtly evil or threatening or seeking violence. The Gorgons share that with their parents and with their other three sisters, the Greyi, who are another set of sisters whose inhumanity is often coming across as monstrous, but who also keep to themselves and don't bother anyone. Neither the stories of the Gorgons or the stories of the Greyi involve them actively trying to harm anyone.

• 10:23Liv Albert?

  Their monstrosity is instead how they look, not in how they behave. The Gorgons, of course, they have this wild, snake-filled hair. They have large tusks sticking out of their mouths. They have wide eyes and sometimes a bit of a beard. Inhuman, yes, but monstrous? I suppose it depends on how you want to define the word. The gray eye meanwhile are the three goddesses who appear as perpetually old women, itself considered something monstrous in the patriarchal world. But aside from gray hair and maybe a wrinkle or two, these women are fairly normal, save

• 11:04Liv Albert?

  for their quirky need to share one eye and one tooth between them. But did they ever use their singular eye or tooth to cause damage to anyone? No, they're just quirky. And yet, from a cultural perspective, we imagine these women, the Gorgons very specifically, as being so inherently monstrous. They're imagined as vicious, dangerous, just ready to tear out or throat or petrify any innocent man who might come across them. It's just that literally none of that exists in the ancient sources. Medusa is killed by Perseus not because she was terrifying, or dangerous, or harmful at all. Medusa is killed by Perseus, in the myth, because he has to prove himself to another man. The Gorgons are impressive.

• 11:48Liv Albert?

  Medusa is the only one of the three who is mortal and therefore capable of being defeated by this hero, and her severed head could, and is, then, used as a weapon. And yet, how does the world see Medusa now? These days, she's either terribly monstrous, surrounded by the stone bodies of so many innocent men, or she's a rape victim transformed into a monster by a goddess. I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of these options, I've done it before, and I don't much like either of them. I do stand by the idea that Medusa is a survivor of assault by Poseidon in sources as early as Hesiod's Theogony, long, long, long before Ovid. But regardless of where that element comes from, what I hate is when it is then used

• 12:32Liv Albert?

  to define her, or primarily when a resulting transformation comes that is then used to define her. Because in the most ancient of the myths, she was born that way, and I think that makes her far more powerful. She was born a so-called monster, but that monster was harmless until her head was severed from her body. So what does that say about this kind of feminine monstrosity? Medusa is so often described as seductive, bewitching, as luring men to her lair. And that's all a misogynist construct from considerably later.

• 13:14Liv Albert?

  She has to be dangerous, otherwise we'd have to face the fact that the hero's journey which killed her was nothing more than a deadly dick-measuring contest between Perseus and Polydectes. She has to be dangerous, because otherwise it makes the hero look bad. Slowly but surely, I hope to use episodes and work like this to redefine the word monster in some kind of way, because to me, it's an aesthetic description that's used to describe creatures who were less than human. It doesn't always imply actual imminent danger or some kind of threat. Like I said, though, this episode isn't entirely about Medusa, she's just our introduction into the idea that monstrosity itself is a construct. And often, it's a construct based entirely in misogyny.

• 13:59Liv Albert?

  Medusa is a monster not because she murdered anyone, but because she was physically capable of defending herself against the threat of a man, the threat of the patriarchy. And that was simply not going to fly, so her head's gone. And so I bring us back to the theme of today. Beware the monstrous woman. Is she dangerous? Or is she simply not easy to victimize?

• 14:42Liv Albert?

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• 15:27Liv Albert?

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• 16:12Liv Albert?

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• 18:27Liv Albert?

  The sirens, so the men say, were three monstrous sea nymphs who lured sailors to their deaths with a bewitching song.

• 18:38Liv Albert?

  Today, the word refers to those creatures, and, much like "the nymph," has also become a word used to describe a particularly type of seductive human woman. It's a word that's become something so far beyond its ancient origins, and in many ways, like my beloved Gorgons, the evolution of the word has become something all on its own, like a completely separate form of misogyny. Like Medusa, the modern imagination of what a siren is, is not just wildly different from the actual ancient creatures of Greek myth, but also distinctly more sexualized, more seductive. Like Medusa, the sirens became sexy ladies whose appeal to men is exactly that, their sexuality.

• 19:23Liv Albert?

  And their danger is amorphous. The danger they pose is only danger if the victim refuses to take no for an answer, or rather refuses to take the warnings and more warnings, and still more warnings, as a deterrent. The victims of the sirens are not truly victims, because in order to become one, the men had to ignore instructions in favor of getting just a little bit closer to sexy ladies who are just singing a song.

• 19:52Liv Albert?

  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Gods, there's so much to these sirens. Firstly, a lesson in the ancient Greek siren. There are references to the origins of the sirens, but for our purposes, I'm less interested in how they became, quote unquote, "became sirens," and far more interested in what exactly it meant to actually be one. In the ancient Greek imagination, the sirens were creatures with the heads and singing voices of human women, but the bodies of birds. And as I said in the title of a past episode on them, they weren't always fuckable. And yet, what do we think of as sirens today?

• 20:30Liv Albert?

  We think sexy ladies, sexy mermaids, all very sexy, very seductive, irresistible. I hate that term. Meanwhile, in practice, how did these bird women behave? Let's revisit that passage that I read at the top of the episode. It's from the Odyssey, as you probably guessed, and Circe is telling Odysseus how it is that he can or should pass by the sirens, how he can best survive their alluring song. Because it is just that. It's a song. We love to imagine that their song is something diabolical, but is it really? Like, here's the bit of the Odyssey again. "You will come to the sirens first of all. They bewitch any mortal who approaches them.

• 21:14Liv Albert?

  If a man in ignorance draws too close and catches their music, he will never return to his fine wife and little children to have them near him and to see their joy at his homecoming. The high, clear tones of the sirens will bewitch him. They sit in a meadow, men's corpses lie heaped up all around them, moldering upon the bones as the skin decays. You must row past there. You must stop the ears of all your crew with sweet wax that you have needed, so that none of the rest may hear the song. But if you yourself are bent on hearing, then give them orders to bind you both hand and foot as you stand upright against the mast's day, with the rope ends tied to the mast itself. Thus you may hear the two sirens' voices and be enraptured.

• 21:55Liv Albert?

  If you implore your crew and beg them to release you, then they must bind you fast with more bonds again."

• 22:03Liv Albert?

  Meanwhile, here is the moment when Odysseus actually does encounter the sirens, when he hears them, when he is strapped to the mast and his men have their ears plugged with wax. Quote, "But then the sirens saw the quick vessel nearing and raised their voices in high, clear notes. Come here, renowned Odysseus, here, you pride and glory of all Achaea. Pause with your ship, listen to our song. Never has any man passed this way in his dark vessel and left unheard the honey-sweet music from our lips. First he has taken his delight, then gone on his way, a wiser man.

• 22:43Liv Albert?

  We know all of the sorrows in the wide land of Troy that Argives and Trojans bore because the gods would needs have it so. We know all the things that come to pass on the fruitful earth."

• 22:56Liv Albert?

  So was that song seductive, or sexual, or even alluring, or dangerous, or sketchy in any way? No, the women are singing that they have answers. The women are singing that they have knowledge, that they know things. And it seems to me that it is simply that men feel like they are entitled to that knowledge. And that is why they can't help themselves, and they get closer, and they shipwreck, they land on the island and their bodies decay.

• 23:35Liv Albert?

  Much like other monstrous women, sirens only really appear in two stories, the Odyssey and the Argonautica. Like Skilla and Charybdis, these are female monsters whose roles are explicitly tied to voyages on the sea. Essentially, we're not supposed to imagine any of this to be just like out in the wider world, the imagination terrorizing just anyone. Yes, they were imagined to be creatures whom sailors, very specifically, should fear, but the rest of humanity, it's not a big deal.

• 24:06Liv Albert?

  And think about what it means to be a sailor, particularly in the ancient world. There's a stereotype, and it exists for a reason. And there's a reason why all of the sex workers of the ancient world worked in the ports. So this idea that men just couldn't resist themselves, that they felt entitled to the singing voices of a beautiful woman, bird or otherwise, just fits pretty neatly in the wider idea of what it meant to be a man living his life on the sea and when he encounters a human woman, what does he want from her?

• 24:46Liv Albert?

  In zero ancient Greek stories are these women intentionally sexualizing themselves, or even are intentionally sexualized. They are, quite literally, birds. And yet, we describe their voices as so intentionally seductive. The implication with seduction is sexuality, but it is also agency. It is that they are intentionally pulling these men for a intention of harming them.

• 25:14Liv Albert?

  But that too, I think, is just not quite right. Like, seduction in the cases of creatures like the sirens and the gorgon seems to be more of a projection than a real intention. What I mean by that is, were the sirens intentionally seducing the sailors to their deaths? Or were they just bird girls singing on a rock, being objectified by sailors, being sexualized by the men who sailed past them?

• 25:40Liv Albert?

  And the same point can be made for their so-called deadly song. Like, was there some otherworldly magic hidden within that song? Something that would draw men against their will and then somehow kill them when they reached it?

• 25:53Liv Albert?

  Or were they bird girls singing from a rock who were spotted by a man who felt like he was owed an audience with them, who grasped power and control with such vehemence that it caused his end? Did the ancient world really imagine that female creatures haunted the seas, the woods, the mountains, desperate to lure men to their beds or their deaths? Or are creatures like the sirens the result of a power structure that convinced the world that girls should be hidden from that world and then left men so desperate for their attention that they would die for it? Are these women monstrous, or are they just appealing conquests for men in a world where women were the prize? To my eyes, these women are some mixture of all of the above.

• 26:38Liv Albert?

  The stories of them, at least, represent equal parts male sex fantasy and their fear of women who didn't or wouldn't fall under that power structure.

• 26:49Liv Albert?

  As for the sirens' victims, there's never an indication at all of violence or of the creatures ever laying a feather on the men who died at their feet. The sirens' victims were not victimized by those sirens. They were victimized in part by their curiosity and in part by their desire for women outside the social structure, women with power and control in a world that demonized those things.

• 27:14Liv Albert?

  It's no coincidence that the sirens of Greek myth evolved far beyond their avian roots. The appeal of these creatures wasn't their song, not really. It was their sexuality. It was the way that appealed to sailors, the way free women appealed to the same men who then oppressed them at home. It was only a matter of time, I think, that they were culturally transformed from an inhuman bird lady form into something far more inviting, something more fuckable. That is, in whatever way that mermaids are more fuckable than birds, I mean. Hell, these days, men are happy with sex robots and AI-generated bimbo-ification. So who am I to question the relative fuckability of a mermaid?

• 27:58Liv Albert?

  So again, beware the monstrous woman. Is she dangerous, or is she simply not easy to victimize?

• 28:09Liv Albert?

  So many of the female monsters that I've covered in this episode have origin stories which were established hundreds and hundreds of years after their stories were first told or first being developed culturally. Ovid tells us that Medusa was transformed from a beautiful girl into the monstrous gorgon. Some sources say that the sirens too were once young, beautiful girls who were transformed as punishment. Skilla too was given and invented past by Ovid. Suddenly, she too was once a beautiful girl who was transformed into a monster.

• 28:43Liv Albert?

  Now, is it just me, or does this seem like a way for men to try to understand why they're sexually attracted to something they've been convinced is a dangerous monster?

• 28:55Liv Albert?

  There are countless examples of this, and for this episode, I just wanted to make a point not to focus on those later stories of transformation. But I do want to tell you why I've avoided this, these bits about their transformations. Because I know it's easy to find stories like that to be, if not explicitly comforting, then like at least interesting in a way that seems to provide explanations for mystical, mythical things that are otherwise inexplicable. But I want you to think about what it means to attach those kinds of transformation stories to monstrous characters who were historically considered to have been born with that monstrosity. Firstly, in the case like Medusa, it presents the idea that a goddess, Athena, transformed

• 29:38Liv Albert?

  a woman as a result of her being assaulted by a god, and somehow is either a punishment or, as it's been reimagined in the more modern world, a way of saving her from future assault. In both cases, though, this explanation takes away the agency and the history of Medusa as being a creature who was always monstrous. Not monstrous as in scary or dangerous, not monstrous as in bad, not monstrous as in like degrading, just monstrous in the way that she was not a pretty young girl. I don't want to think of her as ever being a pretty young girl for so many reasons.

• 30:22Liv Albert?

  One, it explicitly makes her more appealing to the same men who would have had her victimized, who have sexualized her character, and it makes her appearance something forced upon her, as opposed to it being simply her true form. She was born of monster gods. She was always monstrous. It's not a bad thing. It's a very similar story for Skilla. Ovid tells us that she was punished due to some love story, and he links Cersei into the situation. And I'll be honest, I haven't reminded myself of that full story because I don't want to. I want to see her in her true, original form, the way she was born, long before the Homeric epics were ever recorded.

• 31:05Liv Albert?

  Like Medusa, Skilla is monstrous, but she is not dangerous, and she is not violent unless threatened. She's not out there flying around plucking men off. She simply wasn't human. She wasn't a pretty girl who the male poets, the male sailors, the male leaders could sexualize. And that's exactly what makes her powerful. It's exactly what makes Medusa powerful, too. They existed beyond, maybe even before, the strictures of patriarchy and the idea that young, pretty girls should inherently be seductive and sexual. They existed before girls were expected to just be pretty young things for the gods

• 31:47Liv Albert?

  to carry off and lay with. Their power is in their monstrosity, so long as you see it for what it is. Monster isn't an insult, it's simply a descriptor for something that existed beyond the established power structures, and something that often threatened those same power structures. So beware the monstrous woman. Is she dangerous, or is she simply not easily victimized?

• 32:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, nerds, I don't know what this will have ended up looking like. Hopefully, I added in another story, and it actually makes sense because I talked about how many stories there are. Um, if not, I'll get to more later, but either way, um, this is really fun, and I, there are so many like this, and I'm generally fascinated by it. If there are characters that you think of from this and you would like me to talk about, I mean, they don't have to fit into this, or just anything, because I'm just really fascinated by this idea of like, what does it mean to be monstrous?

• 33:04Liv Albert?

  And it seems to me that it is, it's very much like, you know, how a lot of us are trying to break free of patriarchal beauty standards, right? It, it seems to me that this idea of monstrosity is just meant for women who didn't fit into the ascribed beauty standards of the time, and who, in being that way, were threatening to the point where these kinds of stories were developed. And of course, there's so much to be said about the dangers of the sea and how these kinds of creatures are so tied to stories of sailors and the sea itself.

• 33:44Liv Albert?

  And I don't mean to imply that this relative monstrosity in any way takes away from their cultural relevance or their like, structure as being these sort of representations of the dangers of the sea and the dangers of sailing. I think it can be both at once. I think that they represent the dangers of the sea, the dangers of sailing, but simultaneously, and particularly for the sirens, I think they represent the, this kind of concept of sailors being so devoid of female contact that the second they reach a woman, they're going to either pay her for sex or assault her, right? And the reasons why the port cities are where all of the sex workers hang out, and the

• 34:27Liv Albert?

  reason why they have these bird ladies who they just desperately want to go over and presumably sexualize in some way. I think it's just all so tied together, and ultimately, it just comes down to this idea that women were imagined to be a bit of a different species in varied ways from men, and that's something that is unfortunately still pretty common and wild. And so I'm just fascinated with this idea of questioning what it means to be a monster, but really specifically questioning what it means when we have these later stories equally developed by men that try to make that monstrosity inflicted upon them. And I think it really is just a way for those same men who desired them or women like them

• 35:12Liv Albert?

  sexually, for them to feel less weird about it. Like I, and, and also for them to feel like it is their right to sexualize, like Medusa, you know, is such a good example of this, and the ways that her transformation, you know, I, I understand why people today want to reimagine it as, as something empowering, and if that's how you feel, that's absolutely your prerogative. Um, but I don't see that. I see that kind of transformation, which also like unnecessarily puts a blame on Athena or what have you, but I just think it's a way to, um, to make it more palatable that so-called monstrous women were so hypersexualized, were so desired.

• 35:57Liv Albert?

  I think that making them once have, once having been pretty girls, just makes it more palatable to those same men who are using their stories to sexualize and, and often violate women. Plus, they're just big scary monsters, and gods, I love that for them. Happy spooky season. Thank you all so much for listening. Let's talk about myths, baby, is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Select music is by Luke Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, a group of passionate public historians sharing myth and history with a conscience. Find out more about the Memory Collective at collectivemem.com, and listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:39Liv Albert?

  I am Liv, and I love this shit, but more than anything, I love a monstrous woman.

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