Ginger Snaps and Linda Williams's "When the woman looks"
This film is a perfect example of the punishment for gazing and the affinity between monster and woman. Obviously, the two sisters, Brigitte and Ginger are the objects of male gaze. They are being looked at by men from teenage students to an old man, the cleaner. Ginger is particularly characterized as the “desiring look of the male-voyeur-object”, especially when she begins to menstruate for the first time. The slow motion of her nice figure as she walks into the school is an erotic object for the characters. Traditionally, a woman would be punished when she actively looks at the monster. In the film, Ginger is bitten and turns into a werewolf-the “other”. That is the punishment for her looking at the unknown monster in the park at night. Also men in the film who have gazed at the two sisters are punished, either killed or turned into a werewolf. Men are the main victims in the film because they are punished for their voyeuristic gaze. Their vulnerabilities compared to the power of monstrous-feminine Ginger make them afraid of the mutilation and transformation, which prevents them from being “normal" males anymore.
In the reading, Williams says that there exists an “affinity between monster and woman, the sense in which her look at the monster recognizes their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing” (62). In the film, it is not only because Brigitte recognizes their similar status as “other”, but also because they are “together forever” sisters. In school, they are different from the majority students in terms of their crazy interests and personality; they stay isolated from other students and are always jeered and bullied by arrogant girls. So their similar unpleasant experiences allow Brigitte to have more compassion to Ginger. After Ginger becomes infected, Brigitte knows her fears and anxiety about the unknown change happening to her. With the bond of family that linked them, Brigitte is more sympathetic to Ginger than fearful. The different relationship between monster and man or woman is also implied by Ginger’s father and mother. Even though the father doesn’t show up very often, he is the one who always doubts and questions his daughters’ uncommon behaviors. While the mother is always believes and tolerates her daughters. After she finds out her daughters are the murderer of the dead girl, she doesn’t send them to jail or make them take responsibility, but she choose to let them go and destroy the evidence of everything they have done wrong. Thus though both father and mother have a family bond with their daughters, the woman is more sympathetic to the monster.
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