Many years ago, a publisher offered me the chance to publish a book about the figure of the femme fatale, addressed to a general readership. I cannot recommend enough the two books by Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (1986) and Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture (1998), academic monographs that describe very well (and very critically!) how masculine insecurities led to the rise of the femme fatale. I initially accepted the proposal I have mentioned, hoping to disseminate some of Dijkstra’s teachings but as my list of villainous women grew, so did my discomfort with the projected volume.
The femme fatale is a specific kind of villainess who uses her sexuality to fulfil her criminal aims, somebody like Mata Hari (in real life) or Catherine Trammell from Basic Instinct (1991) in fiction. Using sex for empowerment seems to me to be a classic non-feminist strategy that may ridicule (some) men’s dependence on sex but that is ultimately subservient to patriarchy. I ended up abandoning the book on the femme fatale, advising my prospective publisher to find a male writer. As happens, Spanish author Marta Sanz published in 2009 with another publisher an anthology of texts and images on the femme fatale, but this seems to be out of print. By the time Sanz published her volume, the femme fatale had been reclaimed as a figure of anti-patriarchal empowerment by some enthusiastic feminists. My view today, in 2025, has not changed, and I still see the femme fatale as Dijkstra described her: a fantasy embodying men’s misogyny rather than a figure born of women’s demand of power.
In the long time I spent working on my book Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort (2019), I did consider again the femme fatale, and in particular how she compared to the male villains I studied, none of whom use sex to empower themselves. Naturally: there is no powerful women in their stories that they need to seduce to empower themselves as men, and I never found a story in which a villain seduces through sex an even more powerful villain (hey! I thought of Elon Musk and Donald Trump as I wrote this…!). Many villainnesses are femme fatales, but not all villainnesses are femme fatales, and, yes, I could have considered together male and female villains. I did not, however, because misogyny confines the villainess to lower degrees of power than a man can ever conquer. If Adolf Hitler had been born a woman, she would not have gone very far. The few women villains I came across that seemed to break the mould, like Rosa Klebb in the James Bond’s novels, proved my point: she is a formidable foe for Bond, but cannot shatter the glass ceiling limiting women in the supposedly egalitarian Soviet Russia.
At the same time, I briefly theorized in my book that there is a significant difference between the women who conquered some measure of power within patriarchy before and after Second-Wave feminism. Before feminism, women could find themselves in positions of great power through inheritance, marriage, widowhood or motherhood. Few, if any, empowered themselves in other ways, though authorship was from the 19th century onwards an interesting avenue into public life (I’m thinking here of Harriet Martineau or George Eliot). Women’s road to power changed dramatically with First-Wave feminism and the combined conquest of education, property, the vote and the professions. Because Second-Wave feminism was mainly radical and left-wing, we made the collective mistake of thinking that there would be no right-wing feminism, a term, which, indeed, is an oxymoron. Yet, here it is.
The villainess that awoke me to the realisation that women may benefit from the advances in equality of feminism without being themselves feminist was, logically, Margaret Thatcher, UK’s Prime Minister between 1979 and 1990. She came from a middle-class background and empowered herself through meritocratic education and the support of her generous husband Dennis Thatcher. I very much doubt that suddenly in the 1970s the Tory Party became a feminist haven; rather, Margaret Thatcher was so bold and assertive that no Tory man dared raise his voice against her. When they chucked her out, they did it on the sly, in a sort of conspiracy brotherhood. Thatcher destroyed much of the structure of British society, specially its welfare system, claiming that there is no society, only individuals, though personally she did not gain much. She enjoyed the power, no doubt, and being feared and respected but, unlike the billionaire clique now in the White House her material ambitions were more limited.
The other villainess that left me reeling in her fascist brutality was Alma Coin of The Hunger Games. This rebel leader who opposes with all her might the Capitol’s regime headed by President Snow, is presented by author Suzanne Collins with much ageism: her rigid grey hair, Katniss observes with much dislike, seems to stand for her whole rigid personality as a mature woman. Coin dislikes Katniss, wants to use Peeta as the Mockingjay instead, and does all she can to undermine the heroine’s reputation and even kill her. In the end, and I hope this is no longer a spoiler, Katniss realises she must kill Snow, by then a prisoner of the successful rebels, but also Coin when she announces yet another edition of the atrocious Hunger Games with the children of the defeated members of the regime. I had not paid sufficient attention to Katniss’s decision to assassinate Coin in public and thus forfeit her own future. But when the chance came to participate in a book on the final girl, I presented Katniss as a final girl trapped between two psychopaths: the patriarchal monster Snow, and the patriarchal monster Coin. The difference is that whereas Snow is a classic patriarch, Coin is a post-feminist one, who drifts from the left to the right wing fairly quickly as soon as she is empowered.
I am certainly interested in this type of villainess, which I see in the news now embodied by Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and so on. They are not women who depend on a man to access power, but who have accessed political power within right-wing parties that are generally misogynistic towards women, condone gender-related violence and pursue pro-life policies. These women seem to be, as Lady Macbeth wanted, unsexed or degendered in their indifference to the plea of other women. You will always see them surrounded by men because they hardly like other women, whom they tend to see as rivals. Their game is not to seduce men, but to express a type of strongly conservative femininity which can gain masculine respect because, as the men sense, it is patriarchal. What these women forget is that, as happened to Thatcher, men are quick to get rid of the excessively empowered women; in fact, as I argued in my book, this is what happens to male villains, too: the patriarchal system always finds a hero to correct their deviance without altering the status quo.
You can easily find on Google lists of the most prominent female villains, though the category is treated very loosely and encompasses from murderers of a single victim to wide-ranging, structural villainy. Here are a few names in no particular order: Bellatrix Lestrange and Dolores Umbridge (in Harry Potter), Marisa Coulter (in His Dark Materials), Jadis the Snow Queen of Narnia, Daenerys and Cersei in Game of Thrones, the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, Roald Dahl’s witches and Agatha Trunchbull (in Matilda), H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha (in She), Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, Cruella de Ville in 101 Dalmatians, Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, the Queen in “Snow White,” the Other Mother in Coraline, Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Milady de Winter in The Three Musketeers, Annie Wilkes in Misery… take your pick! I will add, for good measure, Reileen Kawahara in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, if only because her lair is the Francoist Valle de los Caídos near Madrid.
As you can see, there is plenty of material to write not one but several books. There are, however, two reasons why I’m not going to be the author of these potential volumes. One is misogyny. The other, too. The first kind of misogyny has to do with the danger of pleasing misogynist men if I claim that women have the same potential as men to do evil, a tenet of which I am totally convinced. Here’s the irony: the only barrier that has prevented women from joining the ranks of the top male villains is misogyny. Suppress misogyny, give women full equality following the demands of feminism and, sooner or later, you will have a woman dictator who will put Hitler to shame. I cannot, however, be the woman to argue this thesis, for it would damage very much the cause of the good women fighting for freedom and equality from left-wing positions (like mine). This is a terrible sort of Catch 22 for I need to warn anyone who will listen that power for fascist domination should never be an object of desire for women, yet if I say that some women might like that type of power, the manosphere out there might conclude that, as they have been saying, all women are evil.
The other kind of misogyny has to do with the limitations of the fictional villainesses. I have already mentioned Rosa Klebb, but allow me to mention Bellatrix Lestrange and Dolores Umbridge. In the Harry Potter universe these two women are examples of complicity with patriarchy, embodied by Lord Voldemort. Bellatrix is besotted with the monstrous villain and, so, her collaboration in his regime is more or less understood (though Voldemort is very far from reciprocating her interest). Umbridge does not even know Voldemort, but she is so convinced about the virtues of his brutal fascist regime that she institutes of her own accord an anti-Muggle inquisition within the Ministry of Magic, which she tries to extend to Hogwarts. Now, try to imagine Voldemort as a woman, and see whether Harry Potter would work, or mean the same. Lord Voldemort’s rise to power follows a classic pattern though Rowling’s original contribution is that Harry neither kills Voldemort nor demands to be empowered once his foe manages to eliminate himself. Voldemort is eliminated at no cost to masculinity, which is reinforced thanks to Harry’s antipatriarchal stance. If, in contrast, Bellatrix had been the one ambitious enough to claim absolute power, this would have reflected negatively on all the witches. Nobody would have trusted Hermione to be appointed Minister for Magic, which she does become because Harry’s victory does not significantly alter the status quo. And because, though mightily intelligent and capable, Hermione is no feminist.
So, what worries me sick is that other feminist women might mistake the empowerment of right-wing women for true feminism. It’s the other way round: conservative women have always been far more powerful than left-wing women, but now that left-wing feminism has paved the way for women’s public empowerment a number of extremely ambitious right-wing women have discovered they can access power without directly depending on men, climbing up the hierarchy of their party, as Thatcher did with the Tories. I long to see Spain (or Catalonia, for that matter) governed by a woman, but I don’t want that woman to be someone like Isabel Díaz Ayuso; I’m all for the other Díaz: Yolanda. In a similar vein, though I would like to see the USA government run by a woman, I would always prefer Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to any of the appalling women in Trump’s new cabinet.
When Games of Thrones, the TV series, ended with Daenerys’s assassination by her nephew and lover Jon Snow, and the ascension to the throne of Brandon Stark, a chance was lost to celebrate a woman hero who claimed power to do good and not for domination. Many voices were then heard arguing that Daenerys was too far gone onto the path of villainy to be reclaimed as a hero. I do not think this is the case, but clearly the male showrunners, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, and the author of the novels, George R.R. Martin, saw Daenerys as a villain. Since Cersei Lannister already occupied a prominent position as a villainess in the show, it would have been appropriate to have Daenerys realise that she was taking the wrong path, and then to have her redeem herself. She could have turned Westeros into a completely different kingdom, as I think the audience wanted, but did not happen.
So, please, somebody write the book I will not write, perhaps as a collective volume. And please, let’s have somebody tell the story of how a woman hero persuades a woman villain that, as Tolkien preached, true power lies in creation and not in domination. In the meantime, brace yourselves for the damage that the new patriarchal villainy in the White House will do, with the complicity of the many women voters that have given their support to Trump and to his extremely dangerous billionaire minions. And the villainesses in his cabinet.