“What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails,
And puppy dog tails,
That's what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice,
And everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of.”
~Mother Goose
I can’t think of the last time when I encountered a woman who was whole-heartedly, exuberantly, unapologetically bad, but I'm always a little glad when I do.
I can’t bring myself to hate a femme fatale. In the gender Olympics, we’re always Miss Congeniality. We make swans out of napkins. We vote left, hate the death penalty, adopt kittens, and are ten times less likely than men to jaywalk. We know the names of flowers and make casseroles. And I would bet good money it wasn’t a man who invented the process whereby you screen pictures of your kids and pets onto t-shirts and mugs. So it gives me perverse delight when I encounter a woman who, plain and simple, you just don’t want to fuck with.
I first realized the immense appeal of the femme fatale at the tender age of eight while at Sunday School, of all places. I was happily eating pages out of my catechism in an attempt to escape the boredom of our teacher’s diatribe on the sin of betrayal when she distracted me from consuming God's word with the story of Samson and Delilah. I was fascinated. Truly to my discredit, it wasn’t until years later that I realized the hero of the story was meant to be Samson, not Delilah. In my eight-year-old mind, Delilah took out the strongest man in the land and managed the destruction of an entire temple of bad guys simply by showing him her boobs. Pretty impressive, and that was on the fourth attempt; perhaps Samson should have caught on when he woke up to her tying his hands and feet the first three times. The concept was much easier to understand than the simultaneous unity and disparity of the holy trinity; Samson may have been able to wrestle a lion and slay an entire army, but exposed nipples were the Great Equalizer.
Since then I’ve had a clandestine admiration for women who traded in insipidity for killer intellect, bullwhips, wraparound sunglasses and Ducati Monsters. We owe a great deal to them. The Mata Hari supposedly wheedled secrets out of some of the highest-ranking officials in Europe during World War I by dancing around in a two-piece curtain. Cleopatra ascended to be ruler of Egypt during a time when most women were still giving birth in haybales, and Sharon Stone may not be able to claim the very first crotch-flashing in cinematic history, but she can certainly claim one of the most memorable.
The femme fatale has also contributed a great deal to the cinematic realm, perhaps in no genre more significantly than the action genre. Male characters, by and large, need to have gimmicky superpowers and a very extensive rationale for any damage they wreak upon society. Wolverine grew adamantine claws and was wildly pissed off because they killed his dad; Spiderman shot webs around and was wildly pissed off because he got wedgies in high school; and Dr. Doom created mystical energy fields with his hands and was wildly pissed off because a time machine on the fritz turned his feet into goat hooves (among other indignities.) By contrast, most femme fatales require nothing more advanced than a tremendous pair of breasts and possibly some leather bondage gear, and their sole reason for evil-doing is usually just sheer boredom. Now that’s my kind of evil. And were it not for the femme fatale, the entire genre of film noir would be non-existent. Someone needs to screw over the trusting sad sack, or we’d all be watching Turner Classics. And no one wants that.
So hail to the bitches, for they do all the things we secretly want to do. They tread shamelessly upon the weak to satisfy their own selfish desires, smoke and wear stiletto heels, drink hard liquor straight up, and you’ll never, ever catch them in pink. And while we won't admit it, that's hot. There’s a reason the entire developed world wants to have sex with Angelina Jolie; she was painting her clothes with her husband’s blood, getting Latin tattoos of death references all over her body and having bisexual affairs with gorgeous asian supermodels while Jennifer Aniston was doing a movie called “The Good Girl” and getting dumped (twice) by Vince Vaughan.
Sorry, Jenn, no contest. Vive la femme fatale.
For MF, who is far too nice to be a femme fatale but who understands the appeal of a fast sportbike and a really kick ass tool kit.
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