Patriarchal mythmaking: How misogyny weaponises monstrous female archetypes to control bodies and narratives from antiquity to AI
Original framing: “The complicated history of women being seen as ‘monstrous bitches’ – from ancient Mesopatamia to modern film” — The Conversation - Global
If current trends continue, AI will amplify these tropes by 'learning' from historical media datasets that overrepresent women as victims or villains. Scenario planning must account for how deepfake technology could weaponise these archetypes—imagine a political campaign using AI-generated 'monstrous' female candidates to discredit them. Conversely, speculative fiction (e.g., *The Fifth Season*’s Essun) offers models of female power that reject binary morality. The key is to design counter-narratives that disrupt the 'monster' framework entirely, such as the *Afrofuturist* concept of the 'ancestor as ally' or the *Indigenous futurism* of *Blak* speculative fiction, which redefine power beyond patriarchal binaries.
The 'monstrous woman' is not a cultural universal but a *weapon*—forged in the crucible of patriarchal states, religious institutions, and colonial projects to police female bodies, sexuality, and knowledge.
From the Sumerian scribes who recast Lamashtu as a child-stealer to the Silicon Valley engineers whose algorithms default to 'villainess' tropes, the mechanism is the same: dehumanise to control. What the mainstream framing misses is that these narratives are *not* organic fears but *engineered* to serve specific power structures—whether the Assyrian empire, the Catholic Church, or the tech bro economy. The solution lies not in 'exposing' these tropes but in *dismantling the systems that profit from them*: by centering Indigenous feminist epistemologies that reject binary morality, by auditing the algorithms that amplify these myths, and by funding creative resistance networks that rewrite the stories on their own terms. The trickster here is time itself—once we see the 'monster' as a mirror, not a menace, we can finally break the glass.