Like, I don’t think I have to explain how perfect an analogy lycanthropy is for a period, so why is it that the only real films exploring that are Ginger Snaps and maybe Turning Red if you stretch the definition. I get that there are female werewolves in media but they’re usually side characters with little depth.
I’d also say werewolves are typically presented as a masc thing, like the whole juvenile “dogs are boys, cats are girls” presentation in a lot of media, but even that could lead to some interesting storytelling with typically masc characters having to go through a very fem experience.
Please, we cannot let the only deep exploration of lycanthropy and sexuality in mainstream media be Joannas botched attempts to make it an analogy for aids and then have a character attack and infect children. So I guess this is a stupid question and a call for requests.
Tapping into another response her but adding on: there are a lot of bits of werewolf media that make little jokes about ‘the time of the month’ for werewolves. It’s an easy little joke to make. (Angua from the Terry Pratchett novels) But the other elements of werewolf tales are far less feminine. #notallwomen and all, but there isn’t a very prominent portrayal across all of fiction of women’s anger as savage or brutal the way there is with masculine anger. The most common portrayal of an angry man is shouting and open violence. The most common portrayal of an angry woman is the silent seethe or the shrill read-to-filth, rarely with open violence. The only sector I can think of that portrays women’s cycles as turning them into something to be feared is boomerhumor comedy about how wives and girlfriends become scary and irrational every month. There are older ladies who might have internalised that enough to identify with it but targeting them with that portrayal would be at odds with the demographic that seems most interested in supernatural fiction which trends young.
Originally the folk concept was heavily affiliated with violent sexual energy, occultism and dark ritualistic sadism. I guess male protagonists conform more readily to those gender stereotypes of the cyclically violent and uncontrollable rapist. During the few witch hunting incidents involving werewolf accusations, the accused were always male. They were also linked with profanation of tombs to devour the recently passed or cannibalism in general. It was also almost always portrayed as either permanent or even voluntary power. The involuntary property or its curse nature rarely universal. With the full moon transformation being almost entirely a Hollywood fabrication.
I think it is interesting to think about the weaving of gender into such symbolism, as the periodic monthly phenomenon is not universal. There’s an Armenian belief that it was a punishment to women, who had to eat children every night for seven years in wolf form. That one is very bleak, but more related to godly punishment of sin by having mothers destroy their locus of adoration, their own children and children in general.
Modern werewolves are related to late 19th century narratives, heavily inspired by Serbian vukodlaks. Dracula himself was kin to werewolves and could transform into one. With some interpreting the gothic tales as an expression of the contemporary anxieties and fears of the victorian era, specially the fears of the patriarchy towards anything they couldn’t control or understand. Anything that was besides the proper order and structure of religion and enlightenment.
wereman is man in old english
werewolf - manwolf
A female werewolf would be a wifwolf.
Terry Pratchett features a prominent female werewolf in the Watch books of Discworld
You know I love a good Pratchett, but even there Anguia (sorry, I forget her name) only appears as a side character, I did almost bring her up to make a point of universes where werewolves exist only male ones get any real spotlight, but she is the most well detailed mainstream example I suppose.
She’s a pretty major character later in the Watch series, I think The Fifth Elephant in particular.
Angua without the i. I was going to mention her if no one else did.
Maybe supports your point though as IIRC she was sort of forced into the watch by an affirmative action campaign from the city. I think there were some sexist attitudes from the male coppers.
Slightly tangential but there was a teenage fantasy series by David Eddings featuring some sorcerers who were basically clarting about as wolves half the time, one of the main characters, Polgara was i think effectively a werewolf, but it was by choice rather than forced by the moon.
Heh, this is interesting, i had no idea male werewolves went back as far as Gilgamesh. https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/although-male-werewolves-have-appeared-in-fiction-since-the-very-beginning-female-werewolves-are-relatively-new-literary-monsters-so-where-do-these-female-werewolves-come-from-and-what-baggage-do-t/
I’d theorize it’d to not sound like theyre shitting on periods too much
Okay, I was actually gonna bring this up under another comment, but there is a well known sense of empowerment people feel from being portrayed as the spooky villain, there’s a great documentary about black people in horror which escapes me right now, but it looks at this phenomenon in more detail.
Well, I think part of the reason is the target audiences.
In movies, they shoot for general audiences as horror usually, which means you just want big and scary, so the gender of the werewolf doesn’t matter. They’ll just be big and scary with little character development anyway, so the male dominated industry just sticks with the default.
In books, however, the target audience now is the paranormal romance audience, which skews heavily female. You’d think this would result in more werewolf women being the main character, but it’s the opposite. The readers don’t want to be werewolves, they want the fantasy of fucking them and taming the bad boy (the genre is very much a hetero dominated one). So the viewpoint character is most often going to be just some woman drawn into whatever the situation is.
Mind you, we’re talking traditionally published here, there’s plenty of casual writers putting stories out on an archive of our own.
However, the field is not empty! Forgive the source, butGoodreads is still good about being able to find things by topic
The third one on that list, Bitten, is part of a fairly decent series that isn’t just soft core erotica or pure romance. Leans little heavy into the whole “alpha” bullshit with the werewolves, but that’s a matter of taste.
Some of those are even more standard urban fantasy rather than paranormal romance, though I’ve found that any urban fantasy with a female protagonist is usually going to include romance at some point.
Anyway, I still think it comes down to writers/producers having a target audience, and putting out what they think will profit rather than primarily trying to explore a concept in depth. You really don’t see much of that in any genre tbh, what with so many production companies and publishers wanting only to invest in something that sells, and having a narrow view of what that is.
I think the thing that I’m learning is the “male dominated industry” part is a hefty portion of the answer to that question.
[off topic?]
Joe Abercrombie’s latest book, The Devils, has a female werewolf. A six foot Viking woman who was incredibly dangerous before she turned, she is now part of a team that does the Vatican’s dirty work.
Fun book.
I came here to mention this. I loved the character and the self estime issues that came with being half a wild beast. The book in general is a good read as well.
I’m very surprised no one has tried to adapt his works.
There was a best served cold movie on the way but it got put on hiatus sadly. I’d kill for GoT like tv series about the first law books and the side ones, but I get why they want to start with best served cold. It stands on its own story wise and feels like medieval ocean elevens.
It looks like ‘The Devils’ is going to be a stand alone [who knows, right?]
Probably be the easiest one to start with, unless they do a movie about the female thief and her warrior bestie.
Oh I shall have to look that up.
I would say there’s the obvious industry sexism that limits it, but I do question if there’s a significant market for it? Werewolves are generally characterized as big, strong, hairy, violent, and bestial, and those tend to be characteristics a lot of women either don’t or don’t want to identify with. While there’s elements of werewolf mythos that some women might identify with, the common understanding of them as an archetype of everything that the social construction of femininity tells women they should be suppressing in themselves. While there’s certainly women out there that reject the common social construction and even actively defy it, I would suggest that that’s a rather niche market. That doesn’t excuse not publishing material for that market, lots of works do quite well playing to the niche, but I wonder if books like that would have any chance of making it into mainstream consciousness… at least without a fandom that becomes known for being a bit… rabid (I’m sorry, I had to).
You need to watch the TV show Wolf Like Me.
That looks cool, thanks for the rec!
Being Human UK version has a female werewolf and a great show.
Also The Magicians has a female werewolf making a period blood reference in a later season but isn’t really much about werewolfs. Great show too.
first thing I thought about when reading the post. the being human that is. I barely remember the whole magicians thing.
That’s Nina right? As I recall she gets turned and very abruptly disappears at the end of season 2.
Yeah Nina. Spoilers>!She gets turned in season 2, becomes a main character in season 3, then “disappears” after season 3 before season 4 starts!<
Is my app bugged? Try putting a space between “Spoilers” and “>!” ?
There is a whole genre of werewolf porn literature and the audience is primarily female. Lindsey Ellis did a couple of videos about this a few years ago.
That’s almost definitely of mostly make werewolves, not female ones like op is asking about
But dub con hetero and original mpreg Omegaverse fiction kind of answers some of the underlying questions that OP is asking.
The sexy werewolf in these stories exhibit certain traits which align with the male gender over the female gender. Outside of furry fiction, I don’t know what a woman werewolf taps into.
In contrast, vampires seem to be more gender balanced. There are a lot of stories out there of a woman vampire seducing an acolyte and her being a woman can be part of the story and not distract from the allure.
So the movie Dog Soldiers is a favorite popcorn movie that has female werewolf in it. On a more serious note the book Moondance by Sumtow is an amazing novel that delves into so many different themes and folklore surrounding werewolves. It’s one of my favorite novels.
Love it, did almost bring it up, but again, Werewolves are very much used as a benchmark for masculinity throughout.
Probably the ‘uncanny valley’ effect. It is too real and jarring. I also think making a story out of the concept will be very difficult to make entertaining. People want things they can relate to. Men won’t be able to relate to it and just find it jarring and women will just read having period = being a monster and won’t appreciate the implication…
If you think something good can be made of it you have to write something yourself :/
Probably the ‘uncanny valley’ effect. It is too real and jarring
Men won’t be able to relate to itA bit of an off-topic but not quite: as both a man, a follower of a left-hand path centered on Lilith and an amateur artist who tries to transmute my gnosis-induced thought-forms into artworks, I’d say the uncanny valley is important to convey Her essence as a powerful feminine energy. Lilith is mostly about the liminal thresholds and the crossroads: neither fully darkness nor fully light, neither fully solar nor fully lunar… Lilith is beautifully, and dangerously, complex to fathom, especially for me as a man, hence why I pivoted from worshipping Lucifer to worshipping Her as soon as She, for some reason I’m yet to understand, decided to pull me to Her path, and have been doing art centered on Her different manifestations, an art of which is full with the uncanny valley effect precisely because She is beyond our human comprehension, beyond what (for example) H.P. Lovecraft could ever convey in his fictional stories.
So what OP asked, to me, sounded practically like what I understand of and see Lilith (hence this aside of mine), except Lilith is more closer to “vampire stories” (vampiress) than to “werewolf stories” (some syncretic interpretations of Lilith, including mine, sees Her as having a connection to wolves, as in, Hekate, although Lilith would be more relatable to owls).
I suppose that’s true, it did kinda remind me of the movie Nightbitch which did run parallel to this concept, and it had nothing to say about it.
Man, were I the sort of prolific creator I would totally get on this, but I struggle to keep up with ideas I have time for!
They’re all on ao3
I’m afraid I’ve only heard of ao3 as being a somewhat spicy website, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Alan Moore’s The Curse is in that direction.
Thanks for the recommendation, I haven’t kept up with Alan Moore outside of his famous stuff, so that’ll be a good exploration.
