Why midlife women are turning to horror
Femgore, rage lit and unrepentant women: female rage is on the rise in fiction for a reason
How furious are you today, on a scale of one to ten? Think one, two or three, for common or garden irritated, plus a bit; four through seven for ‘find your own bloody keys’ and ‘no I don’t know what’s for supper, do you?’; and upwards to 10 and, frankly, beyond, for I really really need to step away from the internet (and my family and my boss and the news cycle and and) before I punch something. Or someone.
More and more often I find myself breeching the top end of this scale and it’s a simmering rage I see bubbling up and over in most of the women around me. Not just older women who have long since parted ways with the people pleasing hormone, but midlife women who are coming to the realisation that if they don’t smash the altar of doing it all that they’ve been worshipping at, it will crush them. And younger women who are looking at the generations above them and thinking WTAF? Is that really how we’re supposed to live?
‘Growing up, women’s rage was invisible to me. Fury was an unacceptable emotion for women. We were Hermione-pilled: groomed to be obedient, compliant, praise-hungry, convinced that if we could just be good enough we could have everything’
Sam Beckbessinger
I could write about rage every week TBH. But that would be boring for all of us. That said, it comes up in every single conversation I have - and most of those, for obvious reasons, are with women over 40. We are seeing it everywhere we look and everywhere we listen. Women are angry. And tired. And so so so fed up.
And it’s manifesting not just in what we say and do, in sleepless nights and angry journals and the resentful, exhausted cycling through the 9-to-5 (or 9-to-9), but in what we watch, what we read, how we spend our limited ‘free’ time.
Culturally that has led to the rise of femgore. Or femmegore. I prefer the latter, it’s well, more… femme! The cultural antithesis of romantasy, if you like. Either way, it’s not hot off the press. But what has seemed, until now, to be the preserve of younger women (somehow unleashed fury seems to be more acceptable if you’re under 30, like almost everything else), is finally making its way into midlife and beyond.
That rage and frustration and urge to reclaim something for ourselves (because let’s face it, if the princess don’t save herself no-one else is going to) is at the heart of my new novel The Invisible Woman (which is still largely under wraps but of which you will be hearing much more before too long) and a new seam of horror adjacent storytelling centring older women. Like Sam Beckbessinger’s new novel, Femme Feral (Bloomsbury) in which Sam applies horror and humour to perimenopause to gratifying (and gory) effect. Have you ever felt ready to howl? The cover blurb asks. Who hasn’t, I ask you.
To that end, I couldn’t think of anyone better than Sam to write about rage and the rise of femgore for The Shift. Here’s what she has to say…
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