“Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax” is a story about Mona and the crew of women who work for a rock girl group. Throughout the story, we hear about the strange happenings when the band is around. At first, we see this when the teenage girls leave the concerts and go out and perform acts of violence, such as the girl who arrived with knitting materials and then later stabbed a man’s eye with one of the needles. Then, strange things happen to the men who get in their way or don’t respect the band like the manager (who would not help the band fix the audio system for the concert)ended up dead with one of the band tee shirts found in his moth . One of the stranger things about the story is that the women who worked for the band feel as though they were “called” by the band. They heard the call by hearing their songs through unplugged radios or hearing random bits of the songs. After hearing the songs they seemed to have commited some act of violence.
All of these events make me think that the band might be sirens or banshees. These sirens only call to women, though, and cause the women who listen to them to do violent things. It allows the listeners to not really go insane but to unleash some of the emotions already inside of them. The fans and crew alike say that “It’s music that needs ravage, to eat.” That’s why I think this story calls attention to the anger and repressed violence that women are forced to keep in. In this society, it is seen as unacceptable for women to be able to express their darker and negative feelings, which means we just have to bottle them up. Teenage girls especially have to do this because of all the angst they feel during this time, which explains why this is the band’s demographic.
This story also reminds me of “Mantis” in the way that these women transform to take back their power from men. Both of these stories call upon the darkness in women that needs releasing. I also see a relation between the band and the Cult of Dionysus. In the Cult, women of the woods would get really drunk following Dionysus and viciously destroy men.