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Page 1 of 2 We have all seen spawns of her whiteness on both the television as well as the silver screen. We heard of stories whereby she appears in the back seat of the taxi late at night. Is she doomed to be single even in death? Where have all the males gone after death?
He Says:
You're walking alone one night, trying to get back home. You walk past the banana trees, trying to push aside the wide green fronds that seem intent on slapping your face. A sound comes from behind the thicket. A twig snaps. You turn, trying to make out what's coming at you from behind the leaves. A branch shifts....and a hideous woman with bloodshot eyes springs at you!
Now that's a bad day.
The creature is a Pontianak, and not your irate girlfriend as some of you might have thought.
A Pontianak is a supernatural creature of Malay and Indonesian folklore. She is said to be the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth. Another version of the Malay ghost is called the hantu penanggalan, a bad tempered female spirit of the forest, and understandably so. Having your intestines hanging out, which the hantu penanggalan is said to have, would make anyone a little grumpy.
However, isn't it curious that so many ghosts of folklore are female, or at least, as female as a ghost can get? You don't hear of many ‘male' ghosts. Why is this?
To find out, I did a little research. The Internet wasn't as forthcoming as I thought. Every time I typed 'female ghost' or 'female demon' into Google, I got websites on Kelly Clarkson. Nevertheless, after much searching, I managed to obtain some insight into the matter. Here's a man's opinion on why so many ghosts are girls, or girl-ish.
Much of the folklore about the supernatural originated from stories handed down from generation to generation. Fathers told them to their sons. Mothers told them to their daughters. However, I'm guessing that the sons were the ones who went on blabbing about it to others more than the daughters. At any rate, the sons were probably louder.
As such, much of supernatural folklore came to play upon distinctly male fears.
Now, what is it that all men fear? The unknown.
We may not admit it, but we're scared to death of things we don't understand. It's human nature. And the most mysterious, unknown things out there, the one thing we can't simply read about, or explore (as much as we'd like to) are Women. The feminine mystique, so to speak.
This awe, this fear, of the feminine is so deeply imprinted in our psyche that we subconsciously build up stories and legends around this. Hence, the ghosts and other spooky things we tell about tend to revolve around women.
This tendency for so many ghosts to be female isn't just a regional thing. In fact, it's prevalent all over Asia, from Japan to Thailand. It would seem that Asian men are petrified of women.
In Japan, for instance, they have female ghosts called onryo. These are spirits of women with anger management issues. You've probably seen them as Sadako in The Ring, or Kayako from Ju-On.
There's also the Mae Nak legend from Thailand, about a spirit of a woman returning out of devotion to her husband. It's a touching tale, despite the fact that her love might just scare her husband to death. Either way, there's no denying the romance.
Both these legends involve women with strong emotional distress who come back from their graves in order to vent their spleens, or rather, the spleens they formerly had.
Women tend to experience heightened emotions as compared to men (I think), and this emotional force may be another basis for so many women becoming ghosts.
Men, on the other hand, don't rise up from their graves, because they would forget what they were so angry about when they were alive. Anyway, men are just happy to get that extra sleep.
All these female ghosts support the observation, made by Shakespeare, that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. And these ghosts are here to make sure that men know it.
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