Nasty Women
By Alexandra Sokoloff
BITTER MOON, Book 4 of my Huntress Moon
Thrillers, is out this week, so thanks to Vicki for hosting this episode of my
blog tour! To briefly
catch up those just joining us, the Huntress books are intense psychological
suspense, and take the reader on an interstate manhunt with a haunted FBI agent
on the track of a female serial killer.
The
premise gives me a chance to turn hated casual tropes of violence against women
inside out.
My killer
kills men. She’s killed lots of them. For years. But
here’s the thing. Arguably there’s never been any such thing as a female serial
killer in real life – the women that the media holds up as serial killers
operate from a completely different psychology from the men who commit what the
FBI calls sexual homicide. Isn’t that fascinating? Don’t you immediately want to know why?
Because
let’s face it – women have a LOT of reasons to kill. And yet… we very, very
rarely do.
I’ll
give you a hint. Serial killers – those in real life, not in authors’
imaginings, are serial rapists who have graduated to murder. So like rape,
serial killing is statistically almost exclusively a male crime. And that fact
allows me to confront and explore the insidious effects of rape culture in the
context of gripping thrillers.
One of
the questions I’m always asking myself, my readers, friends, random people on
Facebook – is – “What’s going to be the tipping point? What is it going to take
for women, and society in general, to finally say, ‘Enough’?”
There’s
been such a great momentum against rape culture building in the last couple of
years. Young college women across the US, mostly sexual assault survivors, have
done an outstanding, revolutionary service by exposing widespread official
cover-ups of rape on university campuses – particularly the systemic protection
of student athletes accused of sexual assault. These women’s efforts have
launched Federal investigations on nearly 200 campuses to date, and have
inspired President Obama and Vice President Biden to create “It’s On Us”
campaign against sexual assault on campus.
So there
was the groundwork. And back in March I thought the Brock Turner case would be
the thing to really bring it home. I’m talking about the Stanford Rapist, a
college --- whose sexual assault of an unconscious college woman was only
interrupted by the intervention of a couple of good Samaritans – but who served
all of three months in jail courtesy of Judge Aaron Persky, a Stanford alum who
was more worried about how prison would affect the rapist than he was about how
the rape had affected and would continue to affect the survivor - and any other
women Brock will go on to rape. Because these guys don’t just do it once. Rape
is a serial crime.
It was a perfect storm of white male athletic
privilege and an old boy justice system that routinely lets predators like
Brock Turner off.
I
thought we’d finally reached critical mass of outrage on that one.
But no.
We were almost mad as hell and not going to take it any more. Then a
combination of several police shootings of unarmed African American men and the
blatant racism of Donald Trump ignited Black Lives Matter protests. And once
again, another sort of injustice took the national spotlight away from building
protests against rape culture.
And I
wondered – again– What is it going to take for a critical mass of women to say
NO? Why aren’t WE taking to the streets?
Well,
now it turns out that tipping point might be – MIGHT be – a presidential
candidate on a hot mike gleefully recounting sexual assault, and then trying to
brush that off as “locker room talk,” even as more than a dozen women have come
forward to confirm the actual behavior, going back years.
Why that
should have been the straw to break our collective back - out of all the things
said candidate has said about any number of groups of people - is beyond me.
But suddenly millions of women were on social media recounting their stories of
first sexual assaults, and collectively realizing that for almost all of us,
there have been far too many to even recall, much less recount. And yet again
(I’m thinking Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas) women are
having to have this national conversation in which the men who love us have to
be walked through how ubiquitous this abuse is for all of us.
And then
in the last Presidential debate, the sexual-predator-in-chief called the other
presidential candidate, the sane one, “Such a nasty woman.” Icing on a
particularly lurid cake. Because we all know what he meant, right? I’ve been
called all kinds of variations of “nasty woman” this summer. Every time I post
anything political, which is pretty much all I’ve been posting for a year now,
I know I’ll have to take time throughout my work day to deal with the trolls
that swarm to my posts and call me (and many of my commenters) all those
variations of “nasty woman.”
“Nasty
woman” might just be the rallying cry we all needed. So many of us embraced
those words with – I think relief is
the word - because it was finally just out there. Have an opinion? You’re a
nasty woman. Protest against oppression? What a nasty woman. Want equal pay for
equal work? You nasty woman. Confront any man about anything that might be
bothering you? Nasty, nasty woman.
I was thrilled
this week that one of my favorite reviewers included this line in his review: “Alexandra Sokoloff’s feminist crime series features the
ultimate “nasty woman” (in the best sense of the word).”
Nasty
women are the finest women I know. And I hope – I really hope – all us nasty
women are finally mad enough not to take it anymore. (As a headline read the
other day: “Trump Finally Pissed Off the
Wrong Woman. All of Them.”)
I’ll be
wearing my NASTY WOMAN tank top this Tuesday, and praying for the fate of the
world.
But it’s
pretty clear to me, my nasty woman killer still has a lot of work to do.
About Alexandra Sokoloff
Alexandra
Sokoloff is the Thriller Award-winning and Bram Stoker, Anthony, and Black
Quill Award-nominated author of the supernatural thrillers The Harrowing,
The Price, The Unseen, Book of Shadows, The Shifters, and The Space
Between; The Keepers paranormal series, and the Thriller
Award-nominated, Amazon bestselling Huntress/FBI Thrillers series (Huntress
Moon, Blood Moon, Cold Moo, Bitter Moon), which has been optioned for
television. The New York Times Book Review has called her a "daughter of
Mary Shelley," and her books "Some of the most original and freshly
unnerving work in the genre."
As a
screenwriter she has sold original horror and thriller scripts and adapted
novels for numerous Hollywood studios. She has also written three non-fiction
workbooks: Stealing Hollywood, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, and Writing
Love, based on her internationally acclaimed workshops and blog (www.ScreenwritingTricks.com),
and has served on the Board of Directors of the WGA, West (the screenwriters
union) and the board of the Mystery Writers of America.
She has
presented her Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop for conferences such as
Left Coast Crime, Romance Writers of America, Romance Writers of Australia,
PASIC, YARWA, West Texas A&M Writers Academy, and weekend retreats
throughout the country, and has taught film story structure at Otis College in
Los Angeles.
Alex is a
California native and a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, where she majored in theater
and minored in everything Berkeley has a reputation for. In her spare time (!)
she performs with Heather Graham's all-author Slush Pile Players, and the
UK-based Slice Girls, and dances like a fiend. She lives in Los Angeles and in
Scotland, with bestselling Scottish crime author Craig Robertson. www.Alexandrasokoloff.com
Find out more about Alexandra on her website and also on Twitter - @AlexSokoloff
About Bitter Moon
Bitter Moon
By Alexandra Sokoloff
Published by Thomas & Mercer (1 November 2016)
ISBN: 978-1503940369
Publisher's description
FBI agent
Matthew Roarke has been on leave, and in seclusion, since the capture of mass
killer Cara Lindstrom—the victim turned avenger who preys on predators. Torn
between devotion to the law and a powerful attraction to Cara and her lethal
brand of justice, Roarke has retreated from both to search his soul. But Cara’s
escape from custody and a police detective’s cryptic challenge soon draw him
out of exile—into the California desert and deep into Cara’s past—to probe an
unsolved murder that could be the key to her long and deadly career.
Following
young Cara’s trail, Roarke uncovers a horrifying attack on a schoolgirl, the
shocking suicide of another, and a human monster stalking Cara’s old high
school. Separated by sixteen years, crossing paths in the present and past,
Roarke and fourteen-year-old Cara must race to find and stop the sadistic sexual
predator before more young women are brutalized.
