What Catwoman Taught Me About Sexuality and Power

This is Fallen Women, a monthly column by Lilly Dancyger on women coded as villains in pop culture, the power in their badness, and how they shaped fans for good.

I dressed up as Catwoman for Halloween nine years in a row in my teens and early twenties. I made the catsuit myself out of two pairs of pleather leggings I shoplifted from American Apparel. It felt appropriate. Each year, I would update my costume: one year I added a leather corset from the renaissance faire, the next I replaced the plain black eye mask and cat-ear headband with a rubber replica of the mask Michelle Pfeiffer wore in Batman Returns, always striving for her perfection.

I know that Catwoman existed long before Pfeiffer’s 1992 rendition, in comic books and on screen played by such legends as Eartha Kitt and Julie Newmar, but for me, Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns will always be the One True Catwoman. I was four years old when Returns came out, and I was immediately enamored. I had a poster of Pfeiffer as Catwoman on my wall growing up, above my bed, her steely gaze protecting me from nightmares and intruders. “She’s so beautiful,” I would say, before I understood the distinct kind of allure she had.

The first time I put on the catsuit, I was fifteen years old and just feebly beginning to understand what it meant to feel sexy; the idea that being wanted can be power as much as it can be vulnerability. I was having sex, but I wasn’t enjoying it—sex was just a thing I knew I should participate in if I wanted to truly belong in my crew of drop-outs who got high and committed vandalism for fun. It was a way to push boundaries and establish myself as No Longer A Child, but I didn’t yet understand it as anything bigger or more personal than that.

I understood flirting to be the act of making myself available, and then waiting to be selected—passive, exposed. But then I pulled on my catsuit, painted my long nails black, laced up my high-heeled Doc Martens, and hid my face except for bright red lips and smokey eyes; and something clicked. I felt powerful and dangerous. I felt people staring at my pleather-clad ass, and rather than hurrying away and blushing, I held my head higher and strutted, slinking my hips like a cat. I thought of the scene in Returns where Catwoman first suits up, and says to her cat, in the first time we hear the hypnotic voice of her new persona, “I don’t know about you Miss Kitty, but I feel so much yummier.”

I had a poster of Pfeiffer as Catwoman on my wall growing up, above my bed, her steely gaze protecting me from nightmares and intruders.

I felt sexy in a way that I never had in short skirts and push up bras, because this wasn’t just about “putting the goods on offer,” as the sweet and bawdy old gay man who lived across the hall from me on the Lower East Side used to call it when he saw me leaving in skimpy outfits. Yes, the catsuit is tight and hugs curves, but it also feels like armor—there’s no exposed skin except for the bottom half of the face; it’s camouflage in the dark, and aerodynamic, built for kicking ass and climbing in and out of windows. I felt unstoppable; visible like something to witness rather than something to possess.

Catwoman is a jewel thief. This is not incidental. Catwoman represents a particular form of female sexuality that is both intoxicating and intimidating to many—she is a woman who takes what she wants, rather than simply being taken. She is sexual agency in all its snarling, pouncing glory, and her taste for expensive things and willingness to take them for herself is a symbol of her commitment to her own enjoyment. She is the opposite of how women—and especially teen girls—are conditioned to understand their own sexuality. So it’s no surprise at all that she’s a villain.

“The dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction is among the oldest themes of art, literature, mythology, and religion in Western culture,” writes critic Janey Place in her famous article Women in Film Noir, which was published in the anthology of the same name. “She is as old as Eve, and as current as today’s movies, comic books, and dime novels.”

Whether or not the Batman comics and films technically count as “noir,” or possibly “neo-noir,” is a hotly-debated topic, but they certainly contain some of the genre’s key elements: the dark, starkly-lit aesthetic; the gritty urban setting; the themes of corruption and a criminal underworld; and of course, a slinky seductress who uses her feminine wiles to draw unwitting men—including the otherwise unflappable protagonist—into danger. Catwoman is the ultimate femme fatale: literally, “deadly woman,” the embodiment of women’s sexuality as a threat.

Place writes that women in noir are “active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality.” It was this idea that drew me to Catwoman and my own catsuit as a teenager: that deriving power from sexuality was possible, when what I’d felt so far as a scrawny adolescent who grown men suddenly leered at on the street—too sexual in public, not sexual enough for my peers and then on a dime, too sexual for them, too—was weakness, fear, exposure. I’d felt hunted. But then, in a catsuit, I realized I could be a huntress.

Wearing the catsuit and embodying Pfeiffer’s slinkiness as best I could in my awkward, skinny body, I understood for the first time that I could be a sexual being, not just a sexual object. I didn’t have those terms for it yet, but you don’t have to know the feminist theory to feel that power inside your rib cage.

The first time I dressed up as Catwoman, I went to a big, loud Halloween party at an artists’ loft in Williamsburg (it was 2003, that’s where the parties were), and I played a game. Rather than pushing my brand-new boobs together and waiting for someone to notice me, I picked out a guy I thought was hot and approached him myself. He had the same scraggly, slouchy art-boy look as the rest of them, and truthfully there wasn’t anything especially dazzling about him, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I had picked him. I waited until he drifted toward the card table covered in large bottles of cheap liquor, and I sidled up to him quietly. “Hi,” was all I said, but I reached deep into myself to not squeak like a nervous teenager but to purr, and to hold eye contact. I wordlessly held out my empty cup, and he filled it from the giant plastic bottle of tequila he was holding before pouring his own. It was such a small moment, but it was a paradigm shift. It was the first time I truly understood that I had power in these interactions. I flirted with that boy all night, and then didn’t go home with him, because I didn’t feel like it.

Wearing the catsuit and embodying Pfeiffer’s slinkiness as best I could, I understood for the first time that I could be a sexual being, not just a sexual object.

After that night, my interactions with men changed. At first, the power came from the catsuit, but once I realized I could pursue, or at least provoke desire in others in a way that was active and intentional, I honed those skills all year. But I still dressed up as Catwoman every year on Halloween as a celebration, an exultation, a refortification. Eventually, I started to only half-joke that it was the one day I year I wasn’t in costume.

But of course, no matter how skilled a huntress I became, I was still also prey, in the way that every woman is prey. I was not as careful as I should have been, perhaps not as afraid as would have been wise, when walking alone late at night, when going places alone with men. The threat of sexual violence buzzed like a low frequency in every day of my life like it does in every day of every woman’s life. I knew that, but I refused, stubbornly, to be afraid. I carried myself like I had a catsuit on every day; like I had claws that could rip a man’s face off if he fucking dared. I wore steel-toed boots and I was ready to aim for the balls. I snarled and hissed, sometimes literally, sometimes just behind my eyes but still loud enough to be clear. I had to believe, in order to live my life without fear, that I was the dangerous one.

That turning of the tables, becoming dangerous to a world that would crush the fragile feminine, is Catwoman’s origin story in Batman Returns, after all. She starts out as the timid, overworked spinster secretary Selina Kyle, who’s thrown to her death—discarded. But she survives, and is transformed from meek victim to vengeful, self-possessed villainess. Her sensuality, which defines her in so many ways, is really just a byproduct of her lack of fear, her commitment to herself and her own pleasures—be they jewels or the sweetness of revenge. This enjoyment of the self and rejection of fear grounds her in her own body with the gravity of focused anger. Because like so many things that appear to be about sex, Catwoman is really about power.

I had to believe, in order to live my life without fear, that I was the dangerous one. 

Catwoman taught me to be an active participant in my own sexuality, a lesson in direct opposition to what so much of the culture tries to teach girls. She taught me to be dangerous. And, perhaps most importantly, she taught me to watch for the traits that are vilified in women, because they’re usually the ones that will make us powerful if we dare to embody them.

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