The Slasher: Moral Panics and the Fear of Female Sexuality

Moral Panics:

Moral panics are when a particular condition, episode, person or group of persons becomes defined by its threat to societal values and interest. A social problem becomes a moral panic when it becomes defined in a way that is disproportionate or exaggerated, revealing underlying social tensions and concerns. Race, gender, class, sexual identity all play an underlying role in such a phenomenon. For example, some people see certain forms of sexuality (or the fear of it) as societal threats and get themselves into a moral panic. Sexuality relates to a wide range of of static and changing sexual desires, identities and behaviors. The moral value of sexuality is defined and upheld by dominant groups of society: conservative, white men. They say: sex if for procreation and between a wife and husband. Anything else = wrong and cause for panic. 

This is panic:

Slashers:

Sometimes these ideas seep onto the screen. Carol Clover in her esteemed essay Her Body, Himself lays the framework for the study of this in the horror sub-genre. She defines a slasher as “an immensely generative story of a psycho killer who slashed to death a string of young, mostly female victims, one by one until he himself is subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.” She posits that these movies are actually the best way to gain a clear picture of society’s sexual attitudes. Judging by the fact the plot of this stories revolve around the deviant behavior of young girls (sex, drugs, alcohol) and the subsequent punishment (torture and death) they receive, I would say this assessment is true.  In this genre there are two types of girls: victims and Final Girls. Final Girls are virgins, they are pure and they are “good.” Victims, in contrast, are whores, they are promiscuous and therefore “bad.” Their victimization is because they challenge societal values prescribed onto women. There is a clear cause and effect relationship between a female character’s sexuality and their death as a consequence of it. 

So pervasive that scholars have conducted studies to analyze this relationship. These studies seem to confirm the relationship between gender, sexual activity and violent victimization in the slasher sub-genre. Welsh’s 2010 study found that female characters who did not engage in sexual activity were more likely (28.1%) to survive than those who did not (13.3%). For male characters, survival does not appear to be contingent on sexual behavior. A similar study conducted in 2020 by Wellman et al. measured the brutalization rates of sexual and nonsexual female characters. Measuring brutalization rates on a 9-point scale, they found the average brutalization rate for pure female characters was significantly lower than those who were deemed sexual. What these studies prove is that there are clear differences between the treatment of “good girls” and “bad girls” and that these messages are presented on screen. 

The Bigger Picture:

With time, this has shifted slightly. As moral panics have died down, societal norms have changed and women have greater agency in storytelling this trend is sure to shift. Many recent films have explored female sexuality and the punishment of it, flipping this narrative or presenting it in challenging ways. Some of these include:

It Follows (2015) dir. David Robert Mitchell  

Promising Young Women (2020) dir. Emerald Fennell

What we should take from this is that women do not deserve bad things for their behavior. Women do not do anything to deserve the brutalization they see on and off the screen. I think this harmful and foolish narrative deserves to die off.