Men fear women, even as they work to make women fear men, because, on the most basic level, male dominance is an illusion. For patriarchy to work, men have to control literally every facet of sex and family life– who has sex, with whom, and when and whether they get pregnant, who owns the child, and who care for it– and given the unruly nature of sex and birth, this control is perpetually slipping out of their grasp. Patriarchy is inherently unsustainable: It is not possible to control another human being at every moment of every day. It is not possible to control what (or who) women want. It is not possible to own a resource that is located inside someone else's body, which sex and reproduction always are. And if women realied how fragile male control is, everything might change.
So, by constructing this patriarchy, men make monsters: the twisted, slimy, devouring, mutating, massively powerful images of female desire and sexuality and motherhood that take place outside of patriarchy. Monsters are the children that aren't supposed to exist, the feral desires we've fought to repress and forget, the outsiders waiting at the edge of our social world to confront us, the primeval, female body, that gives and takes life without permission. Men's dread of this power has given rise to countless, bluntly anatomical nightmares: corrupting uteruses poisonous blood, women who have slimy, serpentine tails instead of vaginas, or snakelike, elastic jaws that swallow men whole, or "castrated" women whose bodies are open wounds. A monster is a supposed-to-be-subjugated body that has become threatening and voracious– a woman who is, in the most basic sense, out of (men's) control.
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from Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers by Jude Ellison Sady Doyle
