"The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men"
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Dunn’s real provocation isn’t that women can be violent; it’s that we still treat female violence as a category error. By calling it “eager” and “voluntary,” she strips away the stock alibis society reaches for when women harm others: coercion, madness, victimhood, tragic necessity. Those words force agency onto the subject, and that’s the pressure point. We can absorb almost any story about women surviving violence. We get queasy when women choose it.
The phrase “unasked question” is a quiet indictment of cultural scripting. It suggests a collective avoidance, not ignorance: a decision to keep the frame intact where masculinity equals aggression and femininity equals moral restraint. Dunn is less interested in the female perpetrator than in the audience that needs her to be an exception. “How society at large reacts” shifts the spotlight from biology to the spectacle of interpretation: newsrooms hunting for motives that domesticate the act, courts and commentators toggling between demonization and infantilization, pop culture turning violent women into either femme-fatale fantasy or aberrant monster.
As a novelist, Dunn’s context is storytelling itself: who gets to be complex, who gets to be legible, who gets reduced to a cautionary tale. The line reads like a challenge to feminism and misogyny at once. Equality doesn’t only mean access to power and sympathy; it also means admitting women’s capacity for cruelty without treating it as proof they were never really women to begin with.
The phrase “unasked question” is a quiet indictment of cultural scripting. It suggests a collective avoidance, not ignorance: a decision to keep the frame intact where masculinity equals aggression and femininity equals moral restraint. Dunn is less interested in the female perpetrator than in the audience that needs her to be an exception. “How society at large reacts” shifts the spotlight from biology to the spectacle of interpretation: newsrooms hunting for motives that domesticate the act, courts and commentators toggling between demonization and infantilization, pop culture turning violent women into either femme-fatale fantasy or aberrant monster.
As a novelist, Dunn’s context is storytelling itself: who gets to be complex, who gets to be legible, who gets reduced to a cautionary tale. The line reads like a challenge to feminism and misogyny at once. Equality doesn’t only mean access to power and sympathy; it also means admitting women’s capacity for cruelty without treating it as proof they were never really women to begin with.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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