Fatal Attraction: Caught in the Crossfire of the Mommy Wars Gender is a performance. While this was a radical idea when Simone de Beauvoir mainstreamed it in her 1949 philosophical feminist masterpiece
The Second Sex, it’s become generally accepted thanks to the work of feminist thinkers who followed and the widespread introduction of gender studies classes in universities throughout the 1970s.
Gender is a role that we play in order to get along in society and achieve our goals and desires. It is shaped by our interactions with other people, through attempts—both successful and failing—to get what we want at our jobs or in our love lives, and the inspiration we see from other people performing the same gender.
But the roles we play, gendered and otherwise, are dependent on the roles other people are playing. If you’re onstage in the middle of
A Streetcar Named Desire and your scene partner launches into a soliloquy from
Macbeth, the whole performance falls apart.
The roles of men in Western society were and are supported by the roles that women play. One woman’s refusal to play along can disrupt the whole system. (Well, not literally—they’d just drag you off to give you a lobotomy and put you back onstage to dust the set pieces.) But in our understanding of a performance, someone refusing to do what is expected of them unsettles everyone else around them.
Which is why
Fatal Attraction had such a tremendous impact on popular culture when it was released in 1987. The setup of the story was not radical—a married man cheats on his wife, so what. A tale as old as time. But the twist was so shocking that the film changed the lexicon (the phrase “bunny boiler” immediately entered slang to describe an unhinged woman), was quoted endlessly (“I’m not going to be
ignored, Dan”), and spawned endless think pieces about the state of gendered relations. And that twist was simply that one woman refuses to play the role assigned to her, the role of mistress. Because rather than fading away after the man is done with their dalliance, she threatens and stalks him. She invades the private sanctity of his home, she shows up at his work and threatens his reputation. The man is supposed to be the one who is in control, but her refusal to play the role expected of her turns a romance into a horror movie.
To put it bluntly, the mistress’s role is death. The mistress is supposed to die when the man is finished with her. The woman who is not fit for marriage, who does not exist within the protection of the family in a patriarchal society, is something to be used and discarded. This is the story of the murdered sex worker, the lesbians who die at the end of their films, the bohemian women who die of tuberculosis, and the rejected mistress who turns to suicide after her lover leaves her for another. It even shows up in
Fatal Attraction, through repeated references to
Madama Butterfly, Puccini’s 1904 opera about a Japanese woman abandoned after her affair with an American soldier. When Butterfly is discarded by a man who marries a more appropriate match, she kills herself with a seppuku knife—the ritualistic death that restores honor to the subject after their disgrace.
Alex’s refusal to die, her almost supernatural persistence and intrusive presence in Dan’s life, marks a turn in the culture. Women could survive outside of men’s protection. She has a job, a social life, love and sex, money, the kind of arty loft apartment in the Meatpacking District that your average Manhattanite would pay through the nose for these days. Alex refuses to play any role that someone like Dan could recognize.
But the fact that Alex does eventually die—not by Dan’s hand but by his wife’s—shows just how destabilizing the ability of a woman to live outside of men’s structures really was. The patriarchal man isn’t the only one threatened by Alex and the “career women” who crept around in the shadows of mass media’s imagination like a baby-eating Baba Yaga. Alex is also a threat to Beth, the traditional wife and mother.
When we meet Michael Douglas in
Fatal Attraction, in a character named Dan, he is on his way up. We see the head of his law firm praising him and inviting him out for dinner, he’s looking into buying a house in the suburbs, he is doing quite well for himself and his wife and daughter. He’s doing so well, in fact, that he, like a lot of ambitious men, starts to feel cramped in his own home. He comes home from a successful business event to find his daughter has taken his position in his bed. His wife seems distracted and busy, her attention focused on real estate decisions and parenting obligations and her own parents, rather than on him.
And so, like any successful man in a man-ruled business, he decides to have an affair. He’s entitled to one. Infidelity was supposed to be his reward for success. How many films, books, operas had taught our Michael Douglas figure and his upwardly mobile peers that this is what a successful man deserves? Isn’t this why men ascend into the professional classes, why they fight their way into exclusive universities, why they work long hours to meet impossible expectations for billable hours, why they stifle anything interesting or unique about themselves way down deep to present a smooth, successful surface? Because once you accumulate enough wealth and power, the rules of morality and decency that govern other people, the common people, no longer apply to you. The king has courtesans; the big-name lawyer has mistresses.
There has always been a steady supply of extra women in the world, ready to service the great man’s needs: secretaries, sex workers, mistresses, service workers, students, the unmarriable, scenesters. Women looking for a way into whatever industry he might be gatekeeping, women who can’t find the loving attention of a husband and family themselves because they so poorly play the role of the wife, wild women who can’t be domesticated, women with “daddy issues,” naïve young women who are still confusing wanting to be like a certain person with wanting to fuck that person.
There have always been risks involved with straying outside the marriage for the successful man. There’s the looming threat of divorce or scandal (or, depending on how you go about it, jail time). But these relationships with women usually have pretty clear trade-offs. Whether you are paying them off with money, romance, material goods, or access to your world, there are boundaries. Rules. Most of those boundaries, at least on the women’s side, are maintained through fear. Fear of losing his affection, fear of getting dumped, fear of being publicly shamed or cast out of his society, fear of his displeasure turning into violence.
Because once they are no longer wanted, the extra women are easily discarded. Give her a cash settlement and an NDA, or maybe dump her body in the river if it’s really not going very well. For the most part, the extra women of the world have known what part they are there to play, and there have not historically been many second acts for them. Mistresses, sex workers, and victims have often kept quiet, or at least waited until the man has passed to spill their secrets. Inhabiting the role of the successful man requires that women play their assigned parts with the same devotion and limitations. Men can get away with infidelity, rape, harassment, and other mistreatment without consequences only if women refuse to talk about it. Marilyn Monroe had an affair with a president and took the story to her early grave; Monica Lewinsky did the same and went on national television.
And it’s not only Alex who is refusing to stay quiet after Dan tries to discard her after their passionate weekend. The only legal case we see Dan working on is related to a sex scandal. A woman who had an affair with a politician has decided not to stay loyal and keep his secrets for him—she wrote a book about it instead. Not even the threat of legal action will silence her. There is nothing the politician can do to prevent being smacked in the face with the consequences of his own behavior.
Ironically, Dan is working on the case on the side of the politician’s mistress and the publisher who wants to help sell her story. And yet still he naïvely has his own affair—with a work colleague—despite having this lawsuit right in front of him, the brief for which might as well have been written by Cassandra: ruin is coming, Dan.
The reason Alex can pose a threat to Dan is because of the protections afforded to her and other women like her by the feminist movement. Dan appeals to various forms of authority to protect him from Alex, but there is nothing to be done. Alex tells Dan she is pregnant; unable to coerce her into terminating the pregnancy, he asks for legal advice to see if there is anything to be done to protect him from being declared legally responsible for this child. There is not. When Dan fears that Alex will reveal to his wife and child their affair, he goes to the police to see about a protection order. But since he can’t prove she has done him any real harm, they can’t intervene—not even to “scare” her as he asks. These scenes are an interesting way of looking at how laws and regulations changed during this era. These institutions of law and order were designed to protect people exactly like Dan, property-owning white head-of-household men. Why won’t they come to his aid?
As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker noted, “the family is the foundation of all civil society.” Which is why it was worrying to those in the American government when during this era the foundation started to show some cracks. Divorce rates were up, single parent households started to rise, and the middle-class nuclear family became endangered.
One major concern was that the welfare state was simply too robust. Families that split apart, leaving single women with low paying jobs, or no jobs at all, responsible for the care of children could turn to social programs like food aid and housing subsidies to replace the man’s wages. The government would be expected to foot the bill for what some called man’s dereliction of duty.
As Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976, he frequently told the story of Linda Taylor, who he and other right-wing political figures deemed the “welfare queen.” She had been receiving welfare checks under several different names and was accused of defrauding the government. The politicians who wanted to reform and gut the social welfare programs pointed to her as just one of many devious women who invented children who did not exist, created fake names to apply for benefits, and ran other scams to use welfare money to buy cars and fur coats. A backlash against welfare recipients started to grow, as people who relied on this supplementary income were tarnished as freeloaders and con artists. This created the pressure required to make sweeping changes to what was up until then a successful and efficient system for preventing childhood hunger and devastating poverty.
One thing both the political left and right agreed on in this era of increased political polarization was that welfare programs had to change. As Melinda Cooper writes in her 2017 book
Family Values, both the neoliberals and the neoconservatives agreed that the restoration of the nuclear family to the center of the American economy was essential for growth. “Although they are much more prepared than are social conservatives to accommodate changes in the nature and form of relationships within the family,” she writes, “neoliberal economists and legal theorists wish to reestablish the private family as the primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state.” In order to decrease the burden carried by the government, the goal was to shift that burden over to the individual.
Many of these changes were designed to protect the state against irresponsible women: women who divorced their partners, women who had children outside of marriage, or women who birthed children without health insurance. Barriers were put in place to prevent these women from easily accessing welfare programs. But many of those barriers also punished men. And the more disadvantaged the men, the more vulnerable they were to these new policies that exposed them to increased surveillance and interference by government programs.
One major victory in this pursuit was the establishment of the requirement that before a woman could receive government support for her children she first had to attempt to collect child support from the father. The Child Support Enforcement program was established in 1984 to help ensure that men not present in the household, either because of divorce or children being born outside of wedlock, still contributed financially to the cost of raising children. These payments were a crucial part of creating financial stability for the rising number of single parent households, but they were also not directly tied into welfare programs. But in 1996, due to the “family first” welfare reforms, the establishment of paternity and the attempt to recoup funds from the absent spouse became a requirement for receiving welfare programs. If the partner applying for benefits did not want to involve the other parent—and many people who had suffered domestic violence at the hands of their partner did not want to involve them in this legal process—then they were not eligible for benefits.
Copyright © 2025 by Jessa Crispin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
