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.
Tonight’s episode will discuss cyberbullying, decapitation, eating disorders, pregnancy, PTSD, sexual harassment, rape and death threats, and intense sexism. As always, there will be some cursing. Please listen with care.
Have you heard of the “women in refrigerators” trope in fiction? It’s where a female character gets horribly injured or dies just to motivate the male lead into action. On a completely unrelated note, my leg just fell off and I feel the end is near. It’s my dying wish that you tell a friend about this podcast. Just…
[cough, cough]
Steph: …tell one…
[cough]
Steph: …friend…
Thanks!
Steph (narrating): Alex steps cautiously, his grip tightening on his shotgun. A former Green Beret, discharged for reasons even the President can’t know, he’s a lethal weapon even without the gun. He sniffs at the air. It’s thick with the scent of decay and something far more sinister.
[A metal gate clangs in the distance]
Steph (as Alex), whispering: What was that?
Steph (narrating): A flicker of movement catches Alex's eye. A figure cloaked in shadow steps into the dim light. She is beautiful, with long, flowing hair and eyes that gleam with an unnatural light. Her skin is pale, almost translucent, and she wears a tattered dress that clings to her curvaceous form.
Steph (as the monster girl): Welcome, Alex. I've been waiting for you.
Steph (narrating): But there’s something off, something monstrous beneath the surface. The gloom just behind her shifts, and something long and hairy stretches over her shoulder. It’s a grotesque, tarantula-like spider leg. From her back sprout seven more, reaching towards him around her otherwise perfect body. Her smile turns menacing. Now he can see her fangs.
Steph (as Alex): Stay back! What are you?
Steph (as the monster girl): I am the guardian of this place, the one who lures intruders to their doom. And you, Alex, are my latest plaything.
Steph (narrating): Alex raises his shotgun, but the monster moves swiftly, her spider legs slashing through the air. His gun clatters from his hand onto the cement floor.
Steph (as Alex): I won't let you win.
Steph (narrating): …He growls.
He reaches for the knife hidden in his boot and the battle begins. The monster woman’s movements are swift and deadly. Alex must use his wits and reflexes to survive. They clash in a deadly dance, dodging and striking, each blow echoing through the dark corridors.
Steph (as the monster girl): You can't escape me, Alex. You will be mine.
Steph (narrating): Maybe it’s the exertion, but the woman’s deceptive beauty is fading quickly. Where there was once a beautiful woman, Alex sees nothing more than a hideous mutant spider. With a final, powerful strike, he lands a critical hit. The monster screams and collapses into a heap of twitching, hairy legs.
In the dark, crumbling corridors of the asylum, Alex stands victorious. But then he sees something skitter out from beneath the body and run for the cover of darkness. He shudders. It looked like a baby. One with too many limbs.
[MUSIC]
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.
How was that voice acting? That was my… Yeah, I thought I'd really go for it. I am home alone so no one can hear me make a fool of myself until I publish this, which is neat.
Last week, we opened Pandora’s box and all the sexism of ancient Greek mythology came pouring out, showing us how female monsters have been used for thousands of years to embody society's fears and prejudices against women. We discussed how these myths have influenced modern perceptions and treatment of women, reinforcing harmful stereotypes and justifying patriarchal control.
Throughout history, we’ve used monsters in our stories to define social limits and borders. As Donna Haraway notes, “Monsters symbolically police the borders of what is permissible.” Monster stories caution us that crossing the lines of social norms puts you at risk of attack by whatever fearful thing is out there, or worse – becoming a monster yourself.
The monstrous women in the myths we discussed last week – Scylla and Charybdis, the gorgons, the Sphinx, and the whole crew – acted as warnings. In fact, the word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrum,” which means “an unnatural portent” or “to warn.” These monster girls served as cautionary tales about the dangers of nature, with which they were often associated, and about the potential chaos that could ensue if women were granted too much power.
But as I said last week, mythology isn’t the only place monster girls hide. Please welcome tonight’s pixelated pyjama-wearing partygoers, the monster girls of video games! They lurk while misogynists leer.
So, a quick recap on the monster girl trope: In the simplest terms, a monster girl is a female-coded creature that combines elements of human and monster. These characters often appear in pop culture. They’re typically designed to be both alluring and terrifying, a mix of seductive beauty and grotesque horror. And this duality plays on male fears and anxieties about female sexuality, power, and autonomy.
The fact that they pop up so often in video games, usually hypersexualised, is kind of weird because gamers are not exclusively male, not exclusively straight, and not exclusively into objectifying women. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the mainstream video game industry itself, or the way female characters appear on screen.
The video game industry has been criticised for its toxicity, especially towards women and minorities, for a long time.
Video games may have started out being played by straight, white, young men, but the demographics have changed substantially, even over the last 20 years. According to the Entertainment Software Association’s 2024 report on the US video game industry, which I’ll link in the show notes, in the US today, players are still largely white, but 29% of players are aged 50 or older, 11% identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, and nearly half – 46% identify as female. The most recent numbers I could find for Australia are from 2019 but show a similar gender breakdown – 47% of gamers identified as female.
Despite the pool of players becoming more diverse, however, the industry still predominantly caters to that stereotypical straight, white, young male gamer. We talked in the last episode about the default “human” being a straight, white male in Western thought. So this isn’t surprising, but it is icky.
The good news is that things are improving a bit, which we’ll talk about towards the end of the episode, but female characters in video games have had a tough time. Usually they’re non-playable characters, or NPCs. Historically, women are often portrayed in one of three ways: as sex trophies for the male protagonist to bone, as damsels in distress that either need saving or serve to inspire him with their gratuitous deaths, or as monstrous villains, who are, of course, the gals we’re here to talk about tonight.
Many of these monster girls have their origins in early tabletop and role-playing games, or RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons. The first edition of D&D’s Monster Manual is full of shapely women who want to eat you.
In D&D and its grandsons, I guess, video games, there’s a big difference between how male and female monsters are portrayed. Male monsters are typically scary because of their size, strength, or ferocity. They’re meant to be physically intimidating.
The horror of female monsters, on the other hand, is almost always rooted in their sexuality. Monster girls are seductive but secretly deadly, or they’re grotesquely pregnant, or they’ve aged out of their sexual attractiveness and become hideous old crones.
Earlier today, I started to watch a video from feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian’s series, “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games”, and I had to stop, like, two minutes in because it was one of those horrifying reminders that none of us ever had an original idea in our whole lives. That's happened to you, I'm sure.
She starts out by talking about the monsters of Greek mythology, and that's when I had to push pause because it was basically, I don't know, everything I wrote for last week's episode of Paranormal Pajama Party, but better.
I want to finish it, but I was scared to do it before I wrote this episode because I was worried that I would just, like, subconsciously steal all of her well-done work and rehash what she's already said. So maybe I have done that. I'll find out later. I'll put a link to the video in the show notes. It's a great watch… or at least the first 120 seconds were.
I did make it as far as her discussing video game designers’ formula behind the creation of the only female monster in “Doom 3”: sexy plus gross equals creepy. This monster has the torso of a topless woman on the legs and abdomen of a giant spider, and she’s also pregnant with some kind of freaky spider baby that you also have to fight and kill.
I know I earlier said I was going to do something for the nerds. Full disclosure, I'm the nerd because I read a fabulous dissertation that I want to tell you about now. This one was by Sarah Stang. Big shout out to Dr Stang. I'm not a gamer and I'm leaning on her work pretty heavily for the rest of this episode. Please find the link to her actual paper in, you guessed it, the show notes.
This formula of sexy plus gross equals creepy is pretty typical in monster creation. Stang points out that female monsters in games (and this includes RPGs like D&D) often fall into one of three archetypes: maiden, mother, or crone.
The maiden is sexual and seductive. The mother is pregnant or associated with childbirth. The crone is an older woman who is supposed to no longer be sexually attractive to the male player. These archetypes reinforce traditional patriarchal views of women's roles and worth reducing them to their sexual status and their potential for motherhood.
These are also the three faces of the triple goddess. Triple goddesses have popped up in lots of societies throughout history. We actually talked about one last season on the "Females, Felines, and Fear" episode. It was Hecate.
The triple goddess is also an important part of many neo-pagan religions. Please don’t come for me, Wiccans, but I… I don’t know how to feel about her.
From what I've been reading, she's usually a celebration of women for neo-pagans. And that's cool, I'm down with that.
But personally, I sort of hate that it boils womanhood down to three life stages, and those stages seem to revolve around the role the female body plays for men. I also don’t love that the whole thing seems predicated on the idea of women as nurturing and emotional, which seems like its own kind of sexism.
And what about those of us whose lives don’t follow this path – who go straight from maiden to crone and skip motherhood altogether, or people like me, who were born old crones? I like crocheted blankets and Murder She Wrote and Grape Nuts and by golly, those kids better stay off my lawn.
But the video game industry doesn’t care how I feel about the triple goddess and this breakdown of women’s lifespans, so their monstrous female characters stick to the hits: maiden, mother, crone.
Monsters who fit the maiden archetype are the ones I think of when I think “monster girl”. They’re typically young, beautiful, and, naturally, hypersexualized. They use their attractiveness as a weapon to lure male characters to their doom. I’ve talked about the seductress stereotype before – it reinforces the idea that women are deceptive. Our pretty features or bodies are just masking the chaotic evil underneath until we can trap a man in our clutches.
The Wikipedia entry for “Monster Girl” specifically references the bubblehead nurses from Silent Hill 2. For those of us without the hand-eye coordination to game, I would describe them as faceless women wearing basically a sexy nurse Halloween costume, with a super low-cut top, a mini skirt, and heels.
According to the female villains fandom wiki, “Their heads face downward, appearing swollen and bloodied and covered in gauze, convulsing violently as they wobble to their target. Their only visible facial feature are bloody, exposed jaws and teeth. When inspected closely the last four fingers of their hands seem to be fused… They emit shrieks and gurgles.”
I was going to play a clip of them here, but… yeah, it’s just shrieks and gurgles. So they may not be ready for radio, but they’ve really got the dangerous sexual allure and unsettling physicality thing down pat.
The mother archetype is a real fertile Myrtle. Last season in the “Coraline” episodes, I talked about Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine, and specifically about the archaic mother. The gist of the monstrous-feminine is that, in patriarchal societies, horror media is often defined by what scares men. In horror, the archaic mother is the source of all life and the ultimate power, but also a terrifying and uncontrollable force. This archetype is all about the fear surrounding women’s ability to create life.
Again, I don’t game, but I am on the internet a lot. And I vividly remember this weird couple of weeks back in 2021 when all of these undersexed dudes were tweeting about how badly they wanted to be stepped on by some giant woman named Lady Dimitrescu. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now, but I can tell you that Lady D, from Resident Evil Village, is a mommy.
Vampire girl 1: Mother, I bring you fresh prey.
Lady Dimitrescu: You’re so kind to me, daughters. Now, let’s take a look at him. Well, well. Ethan Winters. You escaped my little brother’s idiot games, did you? Let’s see how special you are.
Vampire girl 1: Yes, Mother.
Vampire girl 2: Yes, Mother
Steph: She is 9-and-a-half feet tall, which is more than three metres, for my Australian friends, super pale with dark red lipstick and a black bobbed haircut, and she’s dressed like a 1930s movie star, in this long white gown and wide black hat.
She’s gorgeous, but she’s also a vampire with massive hidden claws. She lives in a rundown castle with her daughters, three super attractive science-experiments-turned-corpse-eating-monsters, who are, wouldn’t you know it, examples of the maiden archetype. So we know she can make more monsters whenever she wants.
And she’s also secretly a super scary unattractive dragon-y… tentacle-y… woman thing. Once again – so deceptive!
Lady D is also an example of one of the reasons monster girls often appear in erotica. In the game, she’s always lifting the male hero up over her head so there are multiple shots down the front of her dress. Unsurprisingly, fan-made art popped up around the launch of Resident Evil Village, and a lot of it was focused on female dominance and fetishism. Men like monster girls because they might take control. Not too much control, of course. Only when a man asks for it. And they have to give it back later.
The crone archetype enforces the idea that women lose their value once they are no longer young and beautiful. It’s a reflection of societal anxieties about aging and the devaluation of women who are no longer seen as sexually desirable.
The Witcher games go hard on the hags and on the sexist language. Here’s a nice and offensive in-game description of a monster from The Witcher 3 called the water hag:
“Folk say water hags are drowner's wives. If that be true, 'tain't no wonder why they're such ornery bitches.” says Shemhel of Dregsdon… Sure.
“Some tales mention water hags and swamp bints masquerading as lost old women to lure travellers back to the rickety shacks they build in the wetlands. In truth, only a blind man, or a sighted man blinded with drink, could mistake the rank sludge and rotting carrion of a water hag's den for a cozy cottage, and the hideous hag herself for an innocent grandmother. Their wrinkled, wart-covered bodies stand nearly two yards tall, with skin the colour of a long-dead cadaver and stinking of muck and fish. Bony growths two spans long stick out from their backs, with hair like a tangle of seaweed and claws that would make a werewolf proud completing the picture.”
What that description doesn’t include is their drooping breasts, their buggy eyes, or their bulging bellies. Again, I’d play a clip but they mostly just kind of grunt and growl until the hero, Geralt, murders them brutally. The point is, there’s no mistaking any part of this for sexy – the developers clearly want you to think these critters are gross, and they use the female body to get that message across.
A crone character’s age also associates her with something powerful and ancient – and if we learned anything last week, that means a man has to kill her dead.
And that’s the thing about the monster girls of video games – they all have to be killed. To progress in the game, the player – whose avatar is usually a man – has to destroy female monsters, often for no justifiable reason at all, like Medusa’s head being severed from her body just because it was a king’s birthday.
It must be a strange experience for female players – these women, who look like you, must be attacked and killed. What kind of message does that send about your role in the world?
Interestingly, female portrayals in video games can actually influence players’ behaviour in the games, towards themselves and others.
Objectification theory suggests that women who are socialised in cultures where they see themselves repeatedly depicted in sexualised or dehumanised ways can lead to self-objectification. It’s why we internalise impossible beauty standards or freak out when we get our first grey hair. This can turn into intense self-policing and shame and can result in things like depression and eating disorders.
There’s another phenomenon in psychology called the Proteus effect, in which a person in a virtual environment changes their behaviour based on what their avatar looks like. We do this because we know the expectations other people in this environment have based on the avatar’s characteristics.
For example, in one study, women playing a virtual reality game in which their avatars were sexualised versions of themselves started to change their behaviour, in the game, to be more accepting of rape myths, like victim blaming. The old, “she was asking for it, the way her avatar was dressed” chestnut. Beyond video games, I can see this having actual repercussions in the metaverse if that’s where we’re headed.
On the flip side, other studies have shown that men asked to play games using sexualised female avatars began to show reduced hostile sexism and less acceptance of rape myths.
The good news is that violent video games don’t cause school shootings and sexist video games probably don’t cause real-world sexism, either. A longitudinal study out of Germany showed no link between increased levels of sexism and people who spent a lot of time gaming.
The bad news is that in the virtual worlds where gamers interact, and in gaming communities, hostile sexism is a serious problem. And when people push back, the reaction can be severe.
Enter GamerGate, one of the most notorious and harmful events in the history of video game culture. GamerGate was a misogynistic harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against what some perceived as "woke" culture infiltrating video games. This occurred primarily between 2014 and 2015, and it targeted women in the video game industry, including critic Anita Sarkeesian, who I mentioned earlier, and developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
In August 2014, a blog post by Quinn's ex-boyfriend falsely insinuated that their latest game, Depression Quest, had received a good review because of their sexual relationship with a games journalist. This led to massive harassment campaigns among communities on 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit. Quinn faced rape threats and death threats.
The initial claim was debunked; there was no evidence of a conflict of interest, and the journalist in question never reviewed Quinn’s game. Despite this, the harassment expanded to include anyone who defended Quinn. They documented months of harassment, including doxing – which is when details like your address are shared publicly online – that forced them to flee their home.
Quinn said at a conference, “I used to go to game events and feel like I was going home... Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?”
Sarkeesian had been targeted as early as 2012 for that YouTube series I mentioned, Tropes vs Women in Video Games. When she released a new episode in 2014, it triggered another wave of rape and death threats, along with doxing. Sarkeesian had to cancel a university appearance after someone threatened a mass shooting at the event, claiming they would model it after a 1989 antifeminist mass shooting.
Wu, another game developer, faced similar harassment and threats. The sustained abuse led to her eventually being diagnosed with PTSD. GamerGaters claimed she, Quinn, and Sarkeesian were making the harassment up.
This harassment was framed by the perpetrators as a campaign for "ethics in video game journalism." They claimed to be protecting gamer identity and opposing the influence of feminists and other progressives on the industry.
In reality, GamerGate was… a mess. The loudest voices called it a movement, but to be a movement, you need things like goals, coherent messages and actual leaders instead of a bunch of cowards hiding behind 4chan avatars. It was essentially a terrorist campaign primarily aimed at excluding women and marginalised groups from the gaming industry and intimidating them into silence.
And it didn’t end in 2015. Journalist David Neiwart wrote, “GamerGate heralded the rise of the alt-right and provided an early sketch of its primary features: an Internet presence beset by digital trolls, unbridled conspiracism, angry-white-male-identity victimisation culture, and, ultimately, open racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and sexual and gender paranoia.”
Several of the especially douchey pundits supporting GamerGate went on to high-ranking positions in the alt-right, and the guy who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband in 2022 explained his slide into far-right sewage began with his involvement with GamerGate.
An FBI investigation was opened into the events, but no arrests have ever been made. Law enforcement agencies are less inclined to prioritise cyberharassment cases because the perpetrators are hard to track down and the penalties aren’t very strong. In 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that online threats are not necessarily prosecutable “true threats.”
But believe it or not, things are getting a little bit better for the monster girls – and for the rest of us girls, too.
Contemporary media is starting to show us more monster girls like Marceline the Vampire Queen, from Adventure Time. Not only is she a vampire, but she can transform into various monstrous creatures. Her transformation is not sexy or sparkly, and the creatures she changes into are not cute, but she usually does it to help her friends, who accept and even celebrate her for being who she is. Here’s a clip from a scene of her transforming into a giant black tentacled slime monster the size of a house.
Marceline: Finn, you do not want to go down that road with me.
Finn: With you, I would walk down any road, m’lady. Especially if it leads to the movies.
Marceline: Oh yeah? No one would want to go to the movie with this.
[Evil laughter]
Marceline: What do you think of me now?
Finn: How do you like your popcorn?
Marceline: Ughh.
Steph: In the real world, bills are being introduced and slowly passed into law that protect victims of cyber harassment. Here in Australia, we have an eSafety Commissioner whose whole job is to support people who have been targeted by cyberbullying, harassment or revenge porn.
The rise of deepfakes terrifies me, but legal experts are finding new ways to apply existing legislation to keep up with emerging technology.
And video games seem to be getting better, too. In a lot of ways, GamerGate failed, and there are some very cool games out there taking a completely new approach to the medium. Stang mentions Undertale, a game with the tagline: “The RPG game where you don't have to destroy anyone.”
In the game, your genderless avatar is given a choice – you can attack everyone you come across, the way you would in a more traditional video game, or you can choose to befriend the monsters you run into. The game’s ending changes based on the choices you make along the way.
I’m not saying video games can’t be scary or have scary female-coded characters, of course. I’d just like it if they were a little more creative than the old sexy + gross = creepy template. And one easy way to inject some variety into game design would be to inject some diversity into the gaming industry.
While you’d need to be careful of cultural appropriation, the world’s folklore and mythology are full of terrifying monsters that could inspire new characters. We’ve come across a few of them on this very podcast!
And even if you do rely on a scary lady as your big bad at the end, she doesn’t have to be the same-old same-old maiden, mother, or crone cliche. She doesn’t have to be scary because she has a vagina or a womb, and she doesn’t have to be portrayed with huge boobs. I’m just saying, there are options. I think GLaDOS, the superintelligent computer system from Portal, is a great example of a female-coded character whose menace has nothing to do with her body parts… because she doesn’t have any.
GLaDOS: Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an 'unsatisfactory' mark on your official testing record followed by death. Good luck!
Steph: And maybe, just maybe, if you had people of all genders and backgrounds in the room, you could appeal to a broader audience. They’re already playing games, too, and they want to give you money, video game developers! If we have to have capitalism, let’s at least make it work for us.
All of this being said, I gotta admit that I love the monster girl trope in movies. I especially love that she’s kind of the anti-final girl. I’d much rather a complex, unhinged monster girl make it to the end of the movie than an underdeveloped scream queen who survives just because she’s a virgin.
I also love monster girls whose monstrousness is born out of how frustrating and scary it is to be a girl because it is. It’s really, really scary.
If I could bite the head off of the next creep who tries to feel me up on the bus, or only responds to my husband even though I’m the one who asked a question, you bet your boots I would. I don’t even have to look cute doing it.
[MUSIC]
Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. Honestly, I think the monster girls prefer it that way. They always hiss appreciatively when I hit the switch.
To learn more about Monster Girls, GamerGate, and D&D’s Monster Manual, 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.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
