Vixen

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Femme fatale. French for “deadly woman.”

You hear the term a lot these days, usually in connection with noir fiction and film noir. Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. Matty Walker in Body Heat. Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct. Scheming, sexually demanding vixens who trap their lovers in bonds of murderous desire and use them to further their own ends. Lethal women. Jezebel, Salome, Cleopatra.

But they’re not just products of literature, film, the folklore of nearly every culture. They exist in modern society, too. The genuine femmes fatale you hear about now and then are every bit as evil as the fictional variety. Yet what sets them apart is that they’re the failures, the ones who for one reason or another got caught. For every one of those, there must be several times as many who get away with their destructive crimes.

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