Vrouw

''This article describes Jiralhanae myth. For the sunken human merchant ship, see Vrouw Maria.'' The Vrouw is a mythological entity from pre-Covenant Jiralhanae culture, a secret and dangerous cult comprised of evil women who seek to harm all men. While most modern Jiralhanae accept the Vrouw as a fictional belief from a primitive time, there exist a minority who believe the Vrouw actually existed at some point. Historians for the most part agree that the Vrouw has its basis in fact, but that the retelling of stories has distorted the truth into little more than an exciting series of campfire tales, many of which serve some allegorical purpose in teaching old wisdom to younger generations.

Overview
While the stories about the Vrouw are vast and diverse, a set of commonalities exist regarding the Vrouw cult. Its members are said to be women with an abnormal viciousness that leads them to attack men. They either go naked or wear the skins of their slain husbands. They live and practice either in the depths of the forest or in the lesser maintained areas of cities. It is often said that the Vrouw live “in the dark”, and when a man goes into the dark he risks an encounter with the Vrouw.

The Vrouw are said to lure young men away from their family groups and into the dark where they become vulnerable. How they do this varies and may be due to a magic song or simply the foolish desire for adventure that lives in all men. Upon capturing a man, the Vrouw may then kill him and consume his flesh in an effort to gain the strength of men through sympathetic magic or brainwash him and send him back to his family to try to bring other vulnerable men out “into the dark”. Xenosociologist Poul Wolff suggests that this teaches the valuable lesson that one should avoid unnecessary risk and not charge into the unknown without proper preparation.

The Vrouw are said to have internal politics that impede their ability to commit murder on a large scale. Each member of the Vrouw is so power hungry that they will bicker and fight even amongst themselves. This internal conflict is said to be the only thing stopping them from pulling off mass androcide. This is perhaps an illustration of the Jiralhanae proverb that an enemy’s greatest strength is in turn that enemy’s greatest weakness, although some believe it to be a convenient limitation thought up by some later storyteller as a means of explaining why the Vrouw do not take a more active role if they are as dangerous as the stories would have us believe.

Feminist Interpretation and Criticism
The Vrouw myth has recently fallen under feminist scrutiny following the Stanek-Quirk incident, in which two human feminist women were sexually assaulted by a prominent Jiralhanae man (Lower-Chieftain Badanus) who referred to them as “Vrouw”. As the Vrouw would be unlikely to accept human recruits, it is most likely that the Lower-Chieftain was not being literal, but rather using the word in a metaphorical sense. Additionally, UNSC Sergeant Aliyah Burakgazi wrote in her memoirs that a Jiralhanae man who tried to rape her during the Battle for Sydney made an offhand reference to the Vrouw as evidence that females should not be soldiers. Some feminists believe this points at misogyny underlying the Jiralhanae culture.

Kylli Quirk, one of the victims of the incident, opined that the Vrouw myth was probably created to cover up and demonize a feminist movement among Jiralhanae women. “The Jiralhanae men have maintained complete dominance over their women for thousands of years. I have no doubts that their women haven’t always believed that patriarchy is the will of the gods as the men would like to think. . . The men would doubtlessly react with extreme hostility to the idea of gender equality and would attempt to suppress the feminist movement in any way possible, especially through keeping any men from becoming sympathetic to the cause. . . Through stories like that of the Vrouw, the Jiralhanae patriarchy promotes the ideas that women who seek status equal to that of men must instead be trying to enact hostile takeover and moreover that women must be kept in chains.”

In Popular Culture
In the wake of the Stanek-Quirk incident, the Jiralhanae legend of the Vrouw entered the public consciousness of humanity and in particular inspired young Martian filmmaker Wiremu Ghufran. Ghufran went on to produce the 2567 film Beyond Infinity, a supernatural action-adventure about the UNSC-Sangheili alliance waging war with the fictional Army of Twilight, which is made up of Satan’s minions. These minions at first appear to include the Jiralhanae people as a whole, but a twist in the second act reveals that Jiralhanae are basically good and that the Jiralhanae in the Army of Twilight are in fact the Vrouw.

Related Pages

 * Witchcraft
 * Misandry
 * Misogyny