ALIEN/SIREN “Women have always been monsters… But a monster is not something to dismiss, or look down on.” To mark the anniversary of Jude Doyle’s 2019 book DEAD BLONDES AND BAD MOTHERS: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power [book available here], BPAL is proud to present a new collection of perfume blends inspired by this brilliant work of nonfiction. DEAD BLONDES digs into the meaty places where pop-culture, history, and folklore overlap, presenting a series of monstrous feminine archetypes which perpetually recur in storytelling – including the stories we construct around current events, or events in our own lives. Each archetype comments differently on the roles that women and femmes have been relegated to throughout society; many of these have been reclaimed and turned inside out over time, evolving from punishments into sources of power. “This is a dark book, but some things are clearer in the darkness. This is a violent book, but an unsparing confrontation with violence can bring us to what lies beneath and beyond it.” From Alien/Siren: “Women are defined from the outside, in terms of how they seem to men, rather than from the inside, as thinking, feeling subjects. They are not fellow people, not even a different or worse variety of person, but simply the opposite of men, and hence, the opposite of human. Which leads to the question of how you can have sex with something that isn’t human. In many myths, heterosexuality is portrayed as a kind of legalized bestiality, and attractive women are alluring, predatory, half-human monsters: fairy wives, snake-women, others whose beauty is a thin veneer over their dangerous and alien psyches.” A sebaceous, slick reptilian perfume: green and black vegetal musks, kelp, sea salt, blackened opoponax, violet leaf, Siamese red benzoin, davana, squid ink, and ambergris accord.
