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Let me tell you a secret: every woman is a werewolf.
Once a month, she feels a twisting pain deep in her stomach that swells as the change draws near. It is unpredictable, save for one constant: when the moon hangs full in the sky, she lurches out of a business meeting or a class or the subway and rushes to the bathroom.
There are always other women there, and they all clasp hands or offer comfort, strangers united for a moment by a common foe. Then they lock themselves in and bow their heads and wait for the change, wait to feel like someone has shoved a knife in them and twisted―
―and the pain is indescribable. It is not a firework, it is not a starburst, it is not beautiful or poetic or some service to some greater good as every book would have you believe. It is just agony, and they wrap their arms around their stomach and grit their teeth and try to breathe through it but it never works because it just hurts. The pain creeps up slowly, and when it is all-consuming there is nothing for them to do but throw their heads back against the stall door and pray to a god they don’t believe in for the pain to just stop.
But there is no god in those moments, and no one to look after them, save for each other. When they come out, they share pain-filled glances and tight little smiles, reassuring them all that they survived.
Then they help each other dab away the tears, tuck the tail into the skirt, smooth down the ears in the suddenly voluminous hair. There’s inevitably a young woman spending her first change outside, and the others gather around, helping her apply make-up to disguise the sharper features, showing her how to smile to hide the fangs, and painting her claws to pass them off as nails. Then they offer her a last hug and vanish, becoming strangers once more.
Werewolves are not the ravenous beasts you and I were taught, in stories written by men who were afraid of our power. They don’t tell you the wolf was there to protect Little Red, from the huntsman who wanted to―
Well. We all know what happens to little girls who walk alone.
Let me tell you the true story. Not of Little Red, but of werewolves.
First, we are not, technically, werewolves. It is a measure of our oppression that even our names are not ours: the first men saw us hunt under the moon’s light and believed we were one of them, for surely no woman could ever be so powerful. So they named us werewolf, man-wolf, and it is the name we bear to this day. Wifwolf would be more accurate, perhaps, from the Old English prefix that created the ancient wifman (which you know today as “woman”), but we have no wish to exist only as wives to men.
So werewolf it is, and werewolves we are. Though it fits― for were also means hero , and for all we suffer every day, every one of us is a hero .
Although our shifts are dictated by cycles of the moon, we keep our minds and can nevertheless control the change, to an extent. (Not that men would believe it. Ask them and they will tell you that our lesser animal minds render us too emotional, too aggressive, too controlling, too this or that or a thousand other things to be trusted with any power or agency, even over ourselves. We have proved that untrue, time and time again― but what powerful man will stoop to hear us out?)
During a girl’s first shift, she changes fully into a wolf. Her mother patiently sits nearby, half-shifted herself to provide comfort, ready to wash the sheets clean of the blood that inevitably comes from adjusting to a new body with claws and fangs. When the night is over and she lays panting in bed, her mother teaches her how to reduce the physical changes as much as possible, how to control the symptoms in the week surrounding it, how to pretend like nothing is wrong.
And nothing is wrong, because this is a part of her, but she hides it for the benefit of the men in the world, and that is wrong.
Because this secret is an open one. Everyone knows women are werewolves, but no one talks about it ― never mind that the poorest man keeps silver in his pocket, and the richer ones buy gleaming bullets (the better to kill us with, my dear).
No one talks because it makes men afraid to know that this gift, or curse, or part of us makes us strong.
They are afraid of our strength.
So instead, they teach us to be afraid. They teach us to be afraid of going out at night, of wearing what we’d like. They shut us up the moment we open our mouths, shut us down at the first hint of aggression. They stalk us in alleys under the moon’s half-lidded gaze, reduce us to our bodies and what we can do for them. They write stories that make us the monsters, to make us other, to make us afraid. And all the while, they tell us we are weak, because they know if we ever realized how powerful we are, we would rattle the stars with our wrath.
But what would rattling the stars do, except perhaps knock them from the night sky? What would raging and storming do, except perhaps cloud our view of the moon? Rattling the stars with our wrath would accomplish nothing. It is better by far to stretch out our arms, and turn the stars, and let their light illuminate the adversity we face. The end goal is, forever, and always, change.
And of course, we can’t reach the stars on our own. We stand on the shoulders of our foremothers. We reach down to pull up our sisters. We link hands and boost up our daughters.
All in the hopes of someday, change for all werewolves and women.