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Alexia: Hi! I’m Alexia Bailey, a junior here at the University of Colorado Boulder. Because I’ve been here and seen things, I’m here to share everything I’ve picked up so far, which is a surprising amount of information. “What’s Eating at Alexia” is my unofficial and unfiltered guide to some of the things that being a CU Boulder Buff brings. Think of it as your guide to navigating everything that makes CU Boulder, well, CU Boulder. Whether you’re a freshman finding your footing or a senior with “no body, no crime” level grievances about finals week, I’m here to share my takes, tips and honest observations on everything from the sometimes-unpredictable choices that CU Boulder makes to navigating online controversies that surround and impact college life. College is a wild, unforgettable ride, and “What’s eating at Alexia” is here to make sense of some of it, one opinion at a time.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once declared, “Tell me what you consume, and I will tell you what you are.” So, dearest readers, do you think that he would tell me that I am gothic feminist media?
From “Bunny” by Mona Awad or the 1976 movie adaptation of “Carrie,” I’m entrenched, in my own way, into what early 20th century British tabloids coined “spooky season.” I’ve become enamored with the macabre and the grotesque, though I couldn’t begin to explain why. I feel too busy to appreciate the changing of the seasons, too caught up in the relentless churn of September and October to notice the leaves turning or the air cooling. These past two months have left me unbelievably bored, exhausted, anxious, and energetic all at once. So why, amidst all this contradiction, have I developed a newfound infatuation with this time of year?
I mean, in a way, I feel I can relate to tortured female protagonists, especially after all of my midterm exams this year. I too want to parade around covered in pig blood and turn bunnies into men that I can shape into perfect boyfriends. This isn’t me saying that these stories are perfect, they aren’t, but why does perfectionism matter if you can have something better? Relatability. Truthfully, I’ve never seen myself in the protagonists of any other type of literature. I was not electrocuted to life like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” nor am I quite as annoying as John Irving’s titular character of Owen Meany in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’m boring and mundane in comparison, and for me, that’s the appeal of these women. They offer a kind of escape that feels more honest than the conventional stories we’re so often told.
I think a lot of us grow bored with our mundane lives, and when we’re able to escape into the life of a protagonist doing things we would never dream of doing ourselves, it soothes that mundanity. In a strange way, it even makes us grateful for the boredom. There is something freeing about watching a woman abandon the rules that govern her life, even if the consequences are horrific. For a little while, we get to experience what it might feel like to stop caring about being good, being beautiful, being likable, or being enough, and with this escape comes a warning of what would happen if we burned down a gymnasium full of people and sunk our house into the ground. It’s also nice to not watch the woman be the helpless damsel-in-distress that is always killed in her frilly pink pajamas whilst screaming for her ugly jock boyfriend.
But I think there’s more to it than the thrill of watching a woman become the villain by doing something outrageous. I appreciate when authors give us women who are too angry, too ambitious, too ugly, too strange, or simply too much for the worlds they inhabit. What makes these stories so compelling is that their women rarely become monstrous without reason. There is almost always something tragic lurking beneath the transformation, something that makes their descent into horror feel less like a corruption of their character and more like a tragedy that was waiting to happen, and it’s often a warning for the viewer that this too can happen to you.
The best horror, at least in my opinion, is deeply, almost unbearably sad. Beneath the blood and the body horror and the grotesque little rituals of girlhood, there is almost always something worth mourning. Carrie White wanted to be loved. The girls in “Bunny” want to belong to something, even when belonging requires them to abandon themselves. Their stories are horrifying, yes, but I find their sadness far more difficult to stomach than their violence. I think about Carrie standing in that beautiful pink prom dress, about the brief and terrible possibility that perhaps, for once, the world might be kind to her. What makes the ending so devastating is not simply that she is humiliated, or that she retaliates, but that happiness was so nearly within her reach. For a moment, she is allowed to imagine a life in which she is not the girl everyone laughs at. And then the bucket tips. There is something almost unbearable about watching a person lose something they have barely had the opportunity to experience.
So, this Halloween season, I encourage you to both stay safe when walking from fraternity house to fraternity house and to also immerse yourself in my favorite type of horror, the one that is women-led, and unapologetically strange, and deeply, almost unbearably sad. Watch a woman become the monster she was always accused of being. Read stories that make you uncomfortable, that leave you mourning a character you might have once condemned, that remind you how thin the line between victim and villain can really be.
And perhaps, when the credits roll or you turn the final page, take a moment to consider what made her monstrous in the first place. Was it the blood on her hands, or the world that taught her there was no other way to be heard?
Happy Halloween. May your costumes be cute, your parties be fun, and your favorite fictional women be just a little bit worse.
Contact CU Independent Managing Editor Alexia Bailey at Alexia.Bailey@colorado.edu
