So many books and tv shows about werewolves worship this dominance culture, especially a male-centric dominance hierarchy, and sometimes it drives me nuts because it’s regarded as the default. That if humans transformed into beasts, of course most of the survivors would be men, and of course they’d be violent and territorial and murderous, and of course they’d be vaguely chauvinistic because ‘they can’t help it that’s just how werewolves are’.
It’s this idea that the metaphor for a beast as one’s inner nature is reserved for male characters and male violence, tossed in with frequently-inaccurate anthropomorphic assumptions about animal pack culture.
Where are the stories about the werewolf packs that are mostly female? Where are the stories about the fact that women who’ve born children have a higher pain tolerance than men and would better survive the bite? Where are the stories about the women who spend so much time controlling their passions and their emotions and their desires to navigate in a man’s world that they adapt all to well to controlling their mystical transformations too?
What does a pack of all female werewolves look like? Is there a hierarchical structure, or something else? Does it mean the same thing to be an alpha, a beta? What does it mean to be a lone wolf?
I want the stories about how men who are bitten are more likely to go mad from trying to keep a duality in their minds instead of coming to consensus and sharing space with their wolf-spirit. I want stories about the female alpha wolf who only offers the bite to other girls, because dudes have already fucked up ruling the human world, let’s not let them have the supernatural one too.
I want the story about the trans girl who’s trying to change her outside to match her inside, but all of a sudden has to deal with physically transforming her body three nights a month, because hell if you ever wanted a metaphor about not fitting right in your own skin, werewolves are a good option.
I want the story about how the hedge-witches took wolves as familiars and gave them human souls, turned them into human girls, and forced them to give up the wind and the snow and the grass for a life trapped in human flesh.
I want the story about the teenage werewolf girls who hunt down other monsters while they try to find the right shoes for prom and study for their written driver’s test. And when people joke about them going to the bathroom in a pack, it’s not really a joke. Because girls know a journey is not an adventure unless she brings her friends, and when they travel in packs, they travel in packs.
I want more female werewolves.
BLESSINGS BE UPON THIS POST AND ALL OF ITS BEAUTIFUL WORDS.
This concept of violently-enforced rigid hierarchy within werewolf (and plain old wolf) packs is not only overdone and uninteresting, it’s just plain incorrect. A lot of where this idea comes from is really just profoundly bad science from back in the day, when scientists were studying wolf packs and making sweeping generalizations about what they were seeing. They were in fact studying CAPTIVE wolf packs made up of unrelated adult individuals who had been forced into proximity and confinement… so what they were observating as “natural wolf dominance behavior,” was in fact trapped territorial predators reacting aggressively to the stress of forced socialization and imprisonment. It’s a lot like thinking you’re going to study human social family behavior by going to your local prison and observing the interactions of the human beings present in the prison yard.
Actual wolf packs are generally composed of a breeding pair of adult wolves and sometimes several years’ worth of offspring. There might be aunts and uncles and other non-breeding adults in there, who are usually relatives of other wolves in the pack. The concept of “alpha, beta, and omega” is a profoundly flawed one that has really been thrown out by modern wolf researchers, though you’ll still see it cropping up all the time as we try to explain wolf socialization to ourselves. (We’ve also used this model for other animals, like horses, and you’ll often hear about a “lead mare” and you probably have a concept of stallions who direct every movement of their herd and I could give you a ten-page sermon on why I think that’s all wrong, too.) A wolf pack is a family, not a military structure, and families have all sorts of nuance in their dynamics, not to mention a diversity that goes beyond the nuclear. When writers go straight for this hyper-masculine, hyper-aggressive idea of what werewolf pack dynamics should be like, they’re imposing human behavior on the animal, not the other way around.
Like, speaking of female werewolves, can we all become more familiar with and embrace the legend of Yellowstone’s 832F, a wolf who should be a hero to us all? She led her own pack. She could take down a fucking elk single-handed. (Single-pawed?) She had TWO MATES because one wasn’t fuckin’ enough so she was like “oh, you’re brothers? I like you both, let’s all shack up.” They apparently weren’t very useful (I’m sure they were super pretty though from a wolf perspective) so she handled mmost of the pup-rearing, and hunting for those pups, on her own too. And she didn’t rule her pack with an iron fist, though she undoubtedly ruled it because she was the most competent leader they had and surprise, animals recognize and reward competent leadership in ways we humans only wish our jobs could manage. I MIGHT CRY FOREVER OVER THIS FUCKING BAD-ASS OF A WOLF. Let’s have more of THAT and less of the “oh rar the moon is full that means my latent asshole tendencies come out but it’s the wolf I swear!”
I s2g I am not here for dudebros using their lycanthropy as YET ANOTHER REASON why they can’t just fuckin control themselves.
Wolf rants are my favourite rants.
@jolantru has a werewolf series in which the leader is a woman and a mother of two.
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