Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as brief mentions of cannibalism, childbirth, decapitation, incest, snakes and spiders. Please listen with care.
This episode features the stories of Greek heroes and monsters of antiquity, many of whom were honoured by the gods as constellations. Andromeda, Orion, Perseus… say, did you know you can create a constellation, too?
All you have to do is open your favourite podcast app, find Paranormal Pajama Party, and pick out five stars in a row. You don’t even have to wait until it’s dark out. Yep, it’s that easy! Thanks!
In the stagnant waters of the swamp of Lerna, the hydra lay in wait.
Occasionally, while the bog bubbled and burped, a snake-like head rose sinuously through the mist on a long and scaly neck. A flickering black tongue tasted the poisonous air. Reptilian eyes glared through the darkness. Then the head and neck retreated slowly into the gloom to whisper and hiss to its eight sisters in the shadows.
Sisters. Self. Same. Each head was a part of the whole, a collective mind filled with ancient wisdom, choked with primordial rage.
A creature of darkness and decay, the Hydra had no concept of time, only the endless cycle of hunger and rest. It was the guardian of the swamp and its legendary entrance to the underworld, and each of the hydra’s heads embraced the role with savage pride.
When human intruders lurched into the swamp, crushing whole ecosystems beneath their feet and bringing a poisonous miasma of their own, the hydra woke. Their presence was an affront to the natural order. They came with torches and weapons, thinking they could conquer the darkness.
But this morning, something was different. The air was colder, the gloom thicker. And the head sent forth as sentry tasted something new in the air — something dangerous. The eight other heads lifted from their slumber, necks coiling and twisting around each other, eyes gleaming malevolently.
The intruder was a large man with a grim face, clothed in the skin of a lion. Beside him, a younger one, small but quick. The Hydra studied them cautiously. One of her heads hissed uneasily, and another quickly snapped its fangs as a warning. This was no ordinary human, but the guardian of the underworld could betray no fear.
The big man waded farther into the swamp, and the hydra rose up to her full height to meet him. She twisted her body higher into the air, easily half his height again, and glared down at him, waiting. Warning.
The first strike came so swiftly she barely had time to react. His arm flashed out and something thumped onto the boggy ground between them – one of her sisters.
Pain, intense and burning, coursed through the Hydra, but with it came the familiar surge of regeneration. Where one head had fallen, two more grew in its place, hissing with an even greater fury. She struck, landing a punishing blow of her own and sinking her venomous fangs deep into his flesh. The man screamed but didn’t fall.
The battle raged, a dance of death in the murky waters. The man in the lion's skin moved with a precision that was more than human, but the Hydra was not without her own cunning. She struck back, fangs dripping, heads weaving and snapping with deadly intent.
For every head lost, two more emerged, stronger and more vicious. She revelled in the chaos, feeding off the struggle. Her venom was working its way through his system and he was beginning to stumble. She could feel his dismay as he realised he was going to die here in the Lerna swamp. She reared up to strike the killing blow.
But then something changed. The man shouted a few words and the smaller one—the companion—joined the fray with a burning torch. Her strike went wide when the big man ducked, and her confusion gave him the chance to strike another head from her body. This time, the little man darted close to shove his torch into the wound, searing it closed before new heads could grow.
The pain was excruciating, but her rage was worse. The Hydra fought harder, desperation driving her to new heights of savagery. But the man was relentless, and one by one, the Hydra's heads fell, each neck stump cauterised by the flames. The swamp, once her sanctuary, now felt like her burial ground.
With one final lunge, quick as lightning and as fierce as any cornered creature, she snapped her remaining neck forward, aiming her fangs at the big man’s bearded throat.
But before the Hydra’s last head could complete its final thought, “defeat”, it fell to the swampy ground, severed. The smaller man leapt forward to cauterise the wound, and that was that. The swamp of Lerna fell silent and still, its great guardian brought low by a man and his fire.
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Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales.
Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Is it just me, or are tonight’s pyjama party guests… kind of hot?
Like… I know they’re monsters. I mean, she’s got a bunch of dogs’ heads coming out of her waist, and that girl over there basically just a spider with great hair, but there’s something about them that makes them… I don’t know, sexy.
I can’t quite put my finger on it. Is it their tiny waists? Their huge boobs? Their big, doe eyes that say, “Come hither” while also saying “I’m definitely secretly a giant fungus creature that will spawn thousands of tiny mushroom babies you’ll have to fight in a gruesome death match in which your very soul is at stake”? What is it?
Ohhh. I know. It’s the male gaze.
Tonight’s guests of honour are the monster girls of pop culture! These lovely ladies are a staple of video games, anime and manga, but they also pop up in comic books, horror flicks, and – although not as often as their male counterparts – the surprisingly popular monster erotica romance genre.
Monster girls are typically young, pretty, and hypersexualised, often literally designed to appeal to a heterosexual male audience. Remember that weird Beowulf movie from like 2007 where Angelina Jolie played Grindel’s Mother and she somehow had super-sexy high heels EVEN THOUGH SHE WAS NAKED?
Yeah, she’s a monster girl. So is every female character in the Witcher universe, basically. Henry Cavill loves a monster girl.
When monsters are male, they get to be scary because of their grotesque giant bodies or their deadly nature. When monsters are girls, it’s almost always their sexuality that makes them so monstrous. This is often used to lure innocent male heroes to their doom, but even good monster girls tend to be sexualised – think of She-Hulk wearing a strategically placed, magically growing leotard instead of the tattered shorts He-Hulk gets.
(Side note: I know his name is The Hulk. I just think She-Hulk’s name is bullshit in the same way that saying “lady doctor” or “female comedian”, for example, is bullshit. Why do we all accept that the default doctor, comedian or large radioactive mutant is male? But we’ll get more into that in a moment.)
Often, monster girls get even prettier when they she-hulk out and embrace their full powers. When a monster girl isn’t pretty, it means she’s out of control. And we all know what that kind of behaviour does to a fellow’s libido.
Monster girls have been around for a long, long time. If you’re an ancient Greek, they’ve been around since before the beginning of time. Also, if you’re an ancient Greek, wow. You look great for your age.
Nobody does monstrous women like the ancient Greeks did. Chances are good that when you think of a classic monster a Greek hero had to battle, you’re thinking of a lady. You’ve got your gorgons, your hydra, your sphinx, your harpies, your Scylla, your Charybdis… I can keep going.
Monster girls – or, rather, female monsters, were embedded in Greek mythology from day dot.
Like many Near Eastern religions and social systems, the ancient Greek creation myth centres around a man battling a monster. There are entire podcasts that address the complicated family tree of gods, goddesses and other divine beings that made up the Greek pantheon, so I’m not going to go too in-depth, but here’s a quick overview:
In the beginning, there was chaos. Not in a crazy, disorganised way – in a pre-matter, void way. And also in a female way, because to the Greeks, Chaos was personified as a woman. And then literally out of nowhere, popped a few more cosmic beings: Gaia, the earth; Tartarus, the Underworld; and Eros, love.
And as soon as love showed up, the two female deities, Chaos and Gaia, started making babies. Sort of. In the way that primordial cosmic entities do. These two ladies were the most powerful beings in the universe, and for a long time, they created and shaped things the way they wanted them.
We have to cut Gaia some slack. It was the beginning of the universe, you know? Different times. Back then, it was ok to spontaneously give birth to a son, name him Uranus, and then marry him and have more children together – the Cyclops, hundred-handed monsters called Hecatoncheires, and the Titans.
But even then, it wasn’t ok for fathers to hate their children so much they imprison them back inside their mother’s womb, and that’s exactly what Uranus did. So you can understand why Gaia and her imprisoned children were miffed.
Gaia engineered a way for the Titans to escape her womb – don’t ask questions because I can’t answer them – and get revenge against their father. Which they did, by castrating Uranus and throwing his genitals into the sea, whereupon he either died or… retired to Italy? Again, I don’t know, I’m just sharing what I read.
Cronus, Gaia’s youngest son and ringleader of the attack on Papa Uranus, became the head honcho of the universe. Frightened by prophecies that he’d be overthrown by one of his children, Cronus also became a bad dad and started eating his sons.
Understandably upset by this behaviour, his wife (who was also his sister – remember, different time, not a lot of dating options) worked with Gaia to hide her sixth child, Zeus, on the island of Crete. Then she tricked Cronus into eating a big rock swaddled up like a baby in the infant’s place.
Zeus was the child foretold to overthrow his father. After he grew up a bit, raised by nymphs and a she-goat, he got help from another woman who told him how to sneakily poison Cronus so that he would vomit up first the big rock, and then his five now fully-grown siblings. The newly barfed-up gods and goddesses recognised Zeus as their leader. This group became the Olympians.
Disturbed by this new generation’s taste in music, and TikTok videos, and confusing hair parts (or is that just me?), the older Titans kicked off a years-long war against the Olympians. Things were not looking good for Zeus until Gaia saved the day again by advising him to release his uncles and aunts, her other monstrous babies, to join his side of the war. It totally worked.
Once the Titans were defeated, Zeus banished them to the underworld. But having her children imprisoned was like the one thing Gaia hated. Enraged, she spontaneously popped out one more child: a monster named Typhoeus who was so hideous and awful that all the gods who saw him ran. All the gods, except Zeus.
Zeus, a handsome, man-shaped hunk of rationality, prevailed over the snakey, weird-looking monster sent as the champion of the previously all-powerful female deities, and that, my friends, is why rational, naked men are in charge and emotional, chaotic women are not.
Seems silly, you know? Conveniently, they had a creation myth that neatly explains how everything got here, and why rational, naked men are in charge of emotional, chaotic women, complete with a high-stakes confrontation with an evil snake-like being. Ha. Ridiculous. I mean what’s next? Banishment from some kind of… Eden? Hmm.
But back to the first zany creation story. This myth was the template that all Greek heroic legends followed. With its telling and the subsequent and repeated variations on it, monsters, women, and nature became intertwined in the ancient Greek social order.
Zeus’ triumph over the monsters and his grandmother, Gaia, enabled him to take his rightful place as the overlord of the entire universe. His representation as a non-disabled, cisgender, white man established a visual and conceptual archetype of leadership and divinity, reinforcing the idea that ultimate power and authority were inherently male and white.
In ancient Greek society, mythology played a central role in shaping cultural values and social norms. The myths surrounding Zeus and the Olympians weren’t just stories – they were embedded in religious practices, art, and daily life. They influenced how people perceived the world and their place within it.
By portraying the most powerful being in the universe as a man, the mythology justified and perpetuated the dominance of men in society, and believe it or not, Greek society was patriarchal, with men holding primary power in both public and private spheres. The prominence of male gods like Zeus in mythology mirrored and reinforced this social structure.
Zeus’ portrayal also helped set a precedent for what was considered the “default” human in ancient Greek society. When the non-disabled, cis, white male is the norm, other genders, bodies, and races are seen as deviations from this standard.
And while I can’t say that Zeus and the Greeks are entirely to blame, it feels safe to say that this has had huge repercussions for our world, way beyond the name of Hulk and She-Hulk.
The ancient Greeks may be long gone, but boy, did they leave a mark, and their way of thinking certainly contributed to the reasons that today, the default human is still male. That means that important things like, I don’t know, medical care have major gaps when it comes to caring for anyone who’s not a dude.
For example, because women tend to experience different heart attack symptoms than men do, and heart research was focused on the male body, for a long time, women were being misdiagnosed or not receiving treatment in time.
Workplace policies are made for men, which is why we’re still struggling to figure out things like fair parental leave and equal pay for equal labour. Australia got its first truly female-shaped crash test dummy LAST MONTH, even though we’ve known for decades that the male-shaped dummies weren’t reflecting the ways that women, who are more likely to be seriously injured in car crashes, get hurt.
Gah. I could go on forever, really, but we’re not here to talk about dummies. …Or are we?
The concept of man as the default human was reflected in ancient Greek art and sculpture, which predominantly featured white male figures as a standard of human perfection; in philosophy and literature, where thinkers and writers would use male figures as the protagonists and models of virtue, wisdom, and rationality; and in the social hierarchy: White men were at the top, with women, non-Greeks, and people of different ethnicities occupying lower ranks.
As Zeus battled his way through chaos to get some order into this crazy universe of ours, so did mankind – I have to interrupt myself here. We call it mankind, and it would be weird if I called it womankind even though that should technically mean the same thing. What?!
Sorry. Anyway, up on Mount Olympus, Zeus was setting the example by taming the female personifications of chaos and Earth, and the ancient Greeks believed that it was human beings’ job to do the same thing below.
Nature is always doing freaky things like being fertile, growing stuff, and birthing other stuff. You know, like women. Gaia is earth, and Gaia is a woman, and therefore, in the Greek mind and a squillion other cultures, women and nature are the same. I’d like to own the whole Earth Mother thing, but I’m very much a child-free, indoorsy person so it would feel like a lie.
For the ancient Greeks, it was obviously Man’s job to overcome Nature to make room for good, solid, rational civilisation. And to really get this message across, it was repeated again and again in their mythology.
You may remember episode one of this podcast – the Vanishing Hitchhiker – when we talked about the Oracle of Delphi and how Apollo made it his temple by defeating a giant female snake named Pythia who guarded it.
Fun fact: The giant boulder that Cronus threw up when Zeus tricked him landed at Delphi, and the area was originally a temple for Gaia. So when Apollo killed Pythia, he was repeating Zeus’ victory – violently wresting control from the old, female sovereigns.
There will be a lot of snake monsters in this episode, by the way, because they’re emissaries of, or stand-ins for, the old goddesses, who are chthonic deities – they inhabit the underworld.
Sometimes the Greeks meant that literally. Hades is chthonic as the god of the underworld, but so is Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, because seeds go… underground. You get it.
Snakes live in holes, so despite being the most penis-shaped animal I can think of, they are, nevertheless, symbols of the pre-Zeus chthonic goddesses.
The monsters of Greek mythology are often female because they, too, represent the old goddesses. And a whole heck of a lot of them also represent natural dangers that need to be faced and controlled by human (which again, means male) ingenuity or force.
In the Odyssey, by Homer, Odysseus’ men face a bunch of monsters on their long journey back home. They’re not all female, but the monster girls they meet fit the pattern. First, they narrowly avoid the sirens, whose beautiful voices lure sailors to their doom. According to classicist Debbie Felton, the sirens are a cautionary tale about the dangers of getting distracted while sailing, an activity the Greeks felt a little nervous about.
Homer doesn’t describe the sirens, but later poets and artists would depict them as true monster girls – part woman, part bird. They’re even duplicitous in the way monster girls often are, fooling innocent men into believing they’re gorgeous babes with even better voices and then revealing themselves to be weird-looking all along. Sirens have since leant their names to mermaids, another group of tricky monster girls. Are they sexy or are they scary? It’s so hard to tell!
Once past the sirens, Odysseus’ crew has to navigate a narrow channel between two deadly monster girls. On one side is Scylla, a beautiful nymph punished by a jealous goddess or enchantress, depending on the story you read, because a god fell in love with her. Yeah, it blows.
Homer depicts her as a kind of scaly, dragon creature living in a cave, ready to snatch sailors off passing ships and eat them raw, which is what she does to six members of Odysseus’ crew.
When she appears in other stories, she’s often described as having a human face and breasts, but a ring of dog heads jutting out of her waist. Actually, Virgil calls it a “womb of wolves”, which is absolutely how I will be describing my period from here on out. You’ll note that the monstrous part of her doesn’t show up until you start to get near her lady bits. Hmm. What could that be about?
On the other side of the strait is Charybdis, who is, I’m sorry to say, essentially a hole. A female hole. You do the math. The horror of Charybdis, the whirlpool, is that she will suck the entire ship and crew down and consume them – her hunger is infinite and insatiable. Scylla and Charybdis are clearly metaphors for the dangers of sea travel, but also… yeah, Charybdis is a giant, man-eating vagina.
Mythological monster girls were as comfortable on land as in the sea. As part of his 12 labours, the legendary hero Hercules – who obviously couldn’t hold a candle to Xena, warrior princess, and no, I will not be taking questions – fought the many-headed hydra, a lady serpent monster with toxic breath who was just hanging out in a swamp, minding her own business and being a metaphor for the dangers of pools of stagnant water. So of course, she had to die.
Then there was the chimaera, a lion-goat-snake mashup killed by the hero Bellerophon. Did this fire-breathing lady monster happen to live on the side of a mountain that’s still famous for the way it emits fiery methane jets? Indeed she did.
Not all the monster girls of Greek mythology are metaphors for nature. Sometimes, it was just a story about a heroic man defeating a hideous, chaos-bringing woman-thing.
Take, for example, the Gorgons, led by Medusa, a monster girl who will definitely be getting a future episode of Paranormal Pajama Party of her own because she deserves it.
Was she threatening anyone? No. Was she in the way? No. So why was her snake-covered head decapitated by Perseus? Oh, because she was a monster and he needed a birthday present to bring to a king. Seriously? Ever heard of a gift card, dude?
And then there’s the sphinx, who Oedipus had to slay sometime between killing his father, marrying his mother and making Sigmund Freud’s entire career happen.
The sphinx, who had a pretty face and a great pair of boobs on the body of a winged lion, set up shop on the road outside of Thebes. This was becoming a real tourism issue because she was killing any passing man who couldn’t solve her riddle, which was all of them.
What was the sphinx a metaphor for? Well, I’ll let Jess Zimmerman, author of Women and Other Monsters, answer that one. Quote, “The story of the Sphinx is the story of a woman with questions men can’t answer. Men didn’t take that any better in the fifth century than they do now.”
Zing, Oedipus.
Female monsters were one way that the patriarchal society of ancient Greece could hammer home the message that women are earthy, emotion-driven instead of rational and “other”, and that the natural order was for men to be in charge and on top. Heroes defeat monsters, and heroes are always male. If the monsters aren’t female, they probably have a snake-like feature that symbolises their connection with the primordial chthonic goddesses from the bad old days.
The implicit message is that if women aren’t controlled and are allowed to gain power, the result will be a society plunged into emotion-driven chaos, irrationality and the unknown.
And if you’re like, “Whoa, wasn’t that basically the argument against Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential campaign?” Yes, yes it was. And it was a good thing the red states voted for the other candidate, a rational, orderly male. Otherwise, we’d be in a real pickle.
On that note, I’m relying on a fascinating chapter by Debbie Felton, which I’ll link to in the show notes. In defining what makes a monster, she references the work of another academic named David Gilmore, who says, “Monsters are impressive and fearful because they break the rules — they observe no limits, respect no boundaries, and attack without compunction. Monsters may be projections of a more general wish fulfilment—the wish to be able to do as we please.” [Gilmore] suggests that monsters and their behaviour represent the Freudian id.”
When I read that, I was like, “…Wait a minute, when did I start reading an article about Donald Trump?”.
When you consider how much Greek culture influenced Roman culture and eventually Western thought more generally, you start to see what we’re up against here.
Dismantling the patriarchy is not as easy as getting men to occasionally remember that women are also people, or that we enjoy having functional pockets.
As classicist Mary Beard said in an interview with the LA Times, “Look, we’re a million times more lucky than any women in ancient Greece. But it’s really quite helpful to start to see that [our current gender landscape] is not an accident — this does actually have a long history.”
Times have changed. We no longer believe that fire-breathing chimaeras or Zeus himself might be lurking just over the next hill. But that doesn’t mean we don’t run into the occasional monster girl, and there’s one area in particular where they’re always popping up to seduce or scare male heroes – video games.
But we’ll have to talk about that next week, because oops – I did it again. Got lost in the game, oh baby baby.
And by that I mean…
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Steph: It’s time for lights out at Paranormal Pajama Party. I’ll be back next week with part two of our series on monster girls to discuss video game culture, GamerGate, and why the internet went through that weird phase in 2021 where everyone was suddenly obsessed with getting a giant vampire mommy in a fetching hat to step on them.
To learn more about the monster girls of Greek mythology and the real-world repercussions of Mount Olympus, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
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