More Deadly Than the Male

aka: Deadlier Than The Male

Everything the light touches is his kingdom, but everything that moves is her next victim.
Image courtesy of plakythebirb

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

— Rudyard Kipling, "The Female of the Species"

Alice is a Proper Lady: sweet, patient, and kind; always calm; always ready with a genuine smile, and a warm meal for any unfortunate who crawls to her door. So when all is lost, the defenders have fallen, and the bad guys are battering down the door, every heart sinks and everyone silently prays that someone will come to her rescue before it's too la—

*CRUNCH*

...well. That Death Trap was effective. Gruesome, but effective. Wonder where she got the hyenas...?

This trope describes a setting where the men are fully capable of conventional violence, but the women have a hidden but apparently bottomless capacity for lethal mayhem. To help this trope along, expect the bad guys to dismiss Alice in favor of disabling Bob, Charlie, and Donald, assuming she could never be a threat. She probably won't correct them: in fact, she's likely to capitulate or collude with her captors, suffering indignities no one would expect her to tolerate, just to make her final revenge all the more brutal and more satisfying. Should you be foolish enough to want to trigger such behavior in a female, try pestering her offspring, crossing her in love, or threatening her love interest.

One explanation for this would be, ironically, Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication - guys will settle things down by a ritualised scuffle (which wouldn't be practical if it was too likely to kill the loser) or play-fight (being killed is no fun). Gals don't fight unless they're really, really serious about it, since they settle their minor conflict by talking and prefer other kinds of fun. So they fight to the death. And when you have no chance in a fair fight, that's no incentive to fight fair.

Remember, this does not describe a situation where Bob is weak and Alice is strong. This is when Alice is depicted as far more ruthless, more cunning, and ultimately more bloodthirsty than her Spear Counterpart, even though — or maybe because — she is physically smaller and weaker. Bob may be visibly larger and more aggressive, so he tends more toward forms, codes, and displays of power; meanwhile, the wily Alice bothers not with such things.

This is the precursor to the modern Action Girl, but nonetheless can carry Unfortunate Implications by characterizing women as less morally upstanding than men and by playing into the "crazy bitch" stereotype — in fact, the Trope Namer (Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Female of the Species") cites this trope as a reason that women shouldn't be trusted with power. The difference between the modern Action Girl and this trope is kind of like the difference between a Brave Scot and a Violent Glaswegian. Compare this trope to its masculine equivalent All Abusers Are Male, and Men Are the Expendable Gender.

Contrast Females Are More Innocent (in which women are typically seen or viewed as being more psychologically delicate than men).

Bread and butter to its sister trope Silk Hiding Steel and Nothing Nice About Sugar and Spice.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan: Annie Leonhart, a young woman noted for her exceptional fighting skills because of her small stature. She sometimes jokes that she's a "delicate maiden", but her fighting style is primarily meant to remove the advantage a larger, stronger opponent has over her. She utilizes many kicks, throws, and grappling moves to quickly disable stronger foes, often using their own size and strength against them. This extends to her Titan form as well. While other Shifters primarily rely on brute force, she uses her superior speed and agility to take down her targets.
• Mereoleona Vermillion from Black Clover. She's the strongest woman in the Clover Kingdom and, in terms of sheer strength, more powerful than her Captain younger brother, which is expressed in her brutal melee fighting style compared to his ranged one. As she points out, her family is one of lions and "Among lions, females are the ones who hunt!!"
• Bleach has both male and female fighters. However, among the 13 squads, the two female captains, Captain Soifon and Captain Unohana, "really" stand out among their peers. The former is likely the second best hand-to-hand combatant in the entire story, whose sword manifest itself as a one-hit kill for its first stage, and a nuke — like BFG for the second. The latter is a closet Blood Knight, confirmed as the world's best swordsman, wielding a blade of blood, who will savagely tear apart her opponents, only to heal them and repeat the process until she's satisfied.
• Black Lagoon is a World of Dark Action Girls. While male characters like Mr. Chang and Dutch can definitely handle themselves, the female criminals of the story such as Revy, Balalaika, Shenhua, Eda, and Roberta are much more competent and ruthless in a fight.
• In Claymore there are women who are transformed into half-human hybrids, and for this reason develop superhuman strength. They hunt monsters called yoma that eat human entrails. The ending of the manga shows that some of them get really extremely powerful. Men made into such hybrids cannot become so powerful. They can hardly control these forces and almost always quickly transform into awakened beings.
• Death Note: Naomi Misora is this way in comparison to her husband; while Raye is barely a problem, Light is in some real trouble when she decides to avenge him. Though Light manages to take advantage of her grief and lack of resources to get her out of the game before that happens, her death leads L to him and sets in motion the events leading to his ultimate destruction. The author himself admitted that, if Naomi had lived, there would have been no game. She has enough intellect to come to key realizations, without the issues that bind L, namely L's unwillingness to go for the kill.
  • Even more so in Another Note, in which Naomi's singlehanded solving of the case impresses even L.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Brigg's is a base located in the harshest, most inhospitable place in the world, where men have to be extremely tough in order to just survive a single day there. Olivier Mira Armstrong is the general in charge of said base, and the men under her command are to a man extremely deadly, competent, and loyal. She's also easily the single best normal human fighter in the entire series, and there is a very short list of alchemists and homunculi that she can't definitively beat one-on-one. Her brother, the enormously muscular Alex Louis Armstrong, an alchemist who practices Full-Contact Magic, is not on that list.
• Gintama: There's almost no man in this series who hasn't had his ass repeatedly kicked by a woman for anything from a minor infraction to actual combat. Kondou loses to Otae, Tatsuma loses to Mutsu, everyone but Okita & Kamui have lost to Kagura, Gintoki has lost to every woman except Sarutobi and Ana, and few men can match Nobume with a sword.
• Kekkaishi: the main character Yoshimori is explicitly Unskilled, but Strong to contrast with his childhood friend and crush Tokine, who's Weak, but Skilled. Where he gets bogged down by his soft heart, she's ruthless and willing to get her hands dirty.
• Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple: Miu Furinji is a downplayed example, though she still plays the trope straight compared to Kenichi. For a large part of the story she's clearly the stronger and better fighter of the two. As the gap between the two closes, it still becomes evident that she has the more aggressive and ruthless fighting style , since she has "Dou" ki (when martial artists fuel their skills using aggressive emotions like rage) contrasting with Kenichi's "Sei" ki (when martial artists control their emotions and remain calm and collected).
• Kill la Kill: There are six notable female characters. Two of them are so powerful that all of the most powerful men in the world work for them, Ryuko's goal is to take the other two women down. Gamagoori completely bends his will for Satsuki and Mako out of sincere respect.
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Hildegard von Mariendorf is the deadliest woman in existence, as Reinhard says that her methods can just be as underhanded as Oberstein's, and the fact that she personally ends the war.
• Love Live!: That alpaca with brown fur who's prone to lashing out at the girls? That's actually the female half of the alpaca couple.
• Maken-ki!: On average, the majority of the female students at Tenbi Academy are far stronger and have vastly superior combat capability than the guys. Which also extends to the cast in general, because it's predominantly female, as are most of the series' powerhouses.
• Moshidora: In a flashback in the first episode, Minami, at bat in the bottom of the ninth with the scores tied in a junior baseball game, makes a wild swing at the first pitch that convinces everyone she is a hopeless batter. It turns out that her wild swing was done intentionally to lull the pitcher into a false sense of security, and on his next pitch she is able to get a hit and score the winning run.
• Nectar of Dharani: Dwarven men are elite warriors and war-engineers who craft and use the finest weapons in the world. Dwarven women are the ones who keep their society running smoothly through careful use of assassination.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Ikari Gendo is a Magnificent Bastard who commands a force of Humongous Mecha. His son Shinji pilots one of these mecha. Gendo's wife and Shinji's mom, Yui? She is the soul of said mecha that Shinji pilots, prone to Unstoppable Rage in order to protect her son and ripping her opponents limb from limb before devouring their organs. It's also likely that she is the actual mastermind behind the whole Instrumentality project and the Evas. Gendo really only takes over command because she is no longer able to. By the way, Ikari is her birth surname, not Gendo's.
• Robotech: The idea between the all-female Quadrano Battalion of the Zentraedi is, in the words of their creator Azonia, that "There is nothing more fearsome than an angry female". Given their combat record, she's apparently right.
• In Sailor Moon, the female characters tend to be more bloodthirsty than the male ones. The best example comes from confronting any version of Prince Demando (The Dragon of the second group of villains, who believes himself the Big Bad) with Sailor Venus (a hero): when put having to kill the person they loved, Demando refused (in the manga he ultimately tried it, but that's only in his Villainous Breakdown, and it was merely a collateral effect of what he was actually trying to do), Sailor Venus did it in a heartbeat, twice (while the first time she may have been panicking, given it was her first mission, the second time she had just begged him to stand down while holding him at deadly spellpoint).
• Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac: Seiya points he expected Shaun was meaner and tougher than the others, since she's the only girl around. Eventually Shaun shows that, albeit she's laidback, she's definitely NOT behind the boys in terms of power.
• Slayers: No one is more deadly than Lina Inverse, except maybe her older sister.
• SPY×FAMILY: While Loid is a master spy and no slouch in physical combat should the mission require it, his wife Yor is by far the physically stronger and better fighter of the two, which makes sense as she's an assassin. However, Loid posesses a broader skillset that makes him able to handle jobs beyond simply killing.
• Adiane from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is The Smurfette Principle of the Four Beastmen Generals, and is much more psychotic and violent than her male colleagues. Using her mecha, she beats down most of Team Dai-Gurren's entire brigade by herself.
• YuYu Hakusho: Hiei planned to commit genocide on the Ice Maidens for, among other reasons, throwing him down a cliff as a newborn infant and driving his mother (an Ice Maiden who had conceived him through sex rather than their species's normal parthenogenesis) to suicide, but eventually settled for Cruel Mercy. His twin sister Yukina (the only Ice Maiden he planned to spare) is searching for him to remind him he promised to commit the genocide.

Comic Books

• 2000 AD:
  • Nemesis the Warlock: Female Warlocks are bigger, stronger, and more powerful mages than the males. The phrase itself is commonly used when referring to them.
  • This is also a major theme in Age of the Wolf, where the best fighters are all women and the men are mostly Action Survivors. Pretty literally among the werewolves, where the females are larger than the males (despite mammalian sexual differentiation usually being the opposite, among both humans and wolves).
• The Avengers foes, the Black Order has the 2 most dangerous members being Proxima Midnight, their most fiercest warrior, and Black Swan, their most powerful member.
• Batman and Superman both have codes against killing. Starting in The '80s Wonder Woman, however, explicitly doesn't — despite being the only one of the three to explicitly have a no killing code at their debut — which has led to conflict among them on a few occasions. For Batman, this tends to end badly.
• Batman
  • Out of all of Batman's associates, the ones he has the least control over have been his female ones: Barbara Gordon a. k. a., Batgirl — (who was completely independent of him and considers herself his equal), Catwoman (who skirts the line between vigilante and criminal, and has no code against killing), Spoiler (who became a superhero largely to apprehend her criminal father and then became Batman's student), Batwoman (more loyal to the symbol than the person) and Huntress (who also doesn't bother with Thou Shall Not Kill sensibilities). These ladies, while wanting to prove themselves as Gotham Heroines, don't have any of the "mentor/daddy issues" that the boys have and largely disobey Batman whenever they please.
  • Batgirl Cassandra Cain does have these issues, seeing Bruce as a surrogate father figure. She still qualifies since she is by far the deadliest combatant the Bat-family has ever known, and considers her first loyalty to be the symbol. However, she feels even more strongly about avoiding killing opponents than Bruce — she's just a better (and often more brutal) fighter.
• The Female (of the Species) in The Boys is quite literally named for this trope. She is also Ax-Crazy.
• In the Gallimaufry arc of Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, sweet, cheerful Hooker with a Heart of Gold Louisa Dem Five introduces us to the tradition used in New Hong Kong to honor a murder victim... killing their killer, which she does through a drug-laced snack in the guise of a remembrance ceremony.
  "No, you didn't ruin anything. This is what a New Hong Kong wake is."
• Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars!: Thanks to her powers, Jenny can be destructive to ridiculous levels compared to the rest of the cast. The only thing restricting her from doing this all the time is the fact that she's sworn to keep those powers a secret from the rest of the universe: thus, she must be discreet.
• Among the main and recurring characters of Diabolik, the two most dangerous are not the protagonist, a murderous thief known as the King of Terror, and inspector Ginko, the only man in the police who can match Diabolik and rightly feared by every criminal because he will arrest them, but their respective fiancees, Eva Kant and Altea: where Diabolik's revenge may be terrible, a sufficiently enraged Eva is positively sadistic (her epic revenge on her uncle for driving her mother to suicide was A Fate Worse Than Death, and after a while she started thinking about killing him because she was getting bored), and if she decides to kill you she'll make sure you suffer if she has the time; and where Ginko is constrained by the law and his own status as a police officer, Altea has no such limit, and when prompted to take lethal action by Ginko being in danger she will calmly ask her uncle the phone number of a hitman or, failing that, manipulate Diabolik into killing whoever is gunning for Ginko. Both of them are proper and nice ladies.
• Umar of Doctor Strange fame was initially introduced as being more dangerous than her brother and fellow Faltine, the Dread Dormammu. The writers quickly added the caveat that this was due to her feminine cunning rather than superior magical power. How far this cunning gets her is up for debate, but she's certainly less prone to tricks and manipulation.
• Elektra is one of the few characters in the Marvel Universe that Wolverine considers more dangerous than himself.
• Fantastic Four: Ever since she Took a Level in Badass, Sue Storm has been depicted as the most powerful and terrifying member of the team. When the Black Cat was planning a break in to the Baxter Building to steal a book from Reed's collection, she sited Sue as the scariest thing in the building and made it a point to wait until Sue was away before carrying out her plan.
• In a flashback in Preacher, Herr Starr advises a class of military recruits to shoot female terrorists first; she will be more dangerous than the men since she will have had to work much harder in order to prove herself enough to join them.
• Red Sonja is often touted as superior to any mortal man in combat and often has the skill to back up such a claim. In Issue #41 of the original Dynamite series, Sonja's friend Osin is discussing the legend behind the Blood Dynasty, the first weapon ever used to kill and how the first person who used it was a woman. Osin jokes that it is natural that a woman was the first killer in human history.
• Marvel Comics villainess Selene Gallo is almost always the most powerful member of most villain groups she elects to join whether it's the Hellfire Club (barring the times when Jean Grey or Madelyne Pryor were there) or the Power Elite etc.
• In Sin City, this always happens when Dwight teams up with deadly little Miho. Dwight is a brooding noir hero who can hold his own in a fight. Miho is an extremely agile and deadly Old Town assassin, probably the most dangerous character in the books. Dwight tends to stand back while she slaughters whole groups of enemies in front of him.
• Superman:
  • Supergirl and Power Girl are just as powerful as their cousin, and at the same time more hot-tempered and less self-restrained. Put succinctly, if you get Clark mad, he'll merely punch you out; if you get Kara mad, she'll pummel you to the ground (or, if she believes you can take it, punch you through one planet). By way of example, in Crisis on Infinite Earths the Anti-Monitor almost killed Superman and then got almost killed by Supergirl. And in The Great Darkness Saga, Darkseid took longer to take her down than Superboy. Power Girl has also been shown to be a bit more comfortable with maiming her enemies as seen when she burned off Satanna's arm to make her reveal where she had stashed Power Girl's sidekick Atlee.
  • The Great Phantom Peril introduces Faora Hu-ul in the Superman mythos. She's a cunning, ruthless killing machine thanks to mastering a Kryptonian martial art known as Horu-Kanu and the classic Kryptonian powerset plus telepathy and electrokinesis. All male Phantom Zoners are scared of her, and even Superman is incapable of defeating her in a straight physical fight.
• The Bronze Age Teen Titans. Starfire was a hardened ex-slave from a Proud Warrior Race. Donna Troy? A literal Amazon operating under the same code as her older sister, Wonder Woman. Raven? Half-Demon with daddy issues, and some seriously scary powers. Robin (Dick Grayson) had his mentor's "do not kill" code. Cyborg was strong, but not an experienced fighter, and Changeling (Gar Logan) was only dangerous if you backed him into a corner.
• X-23, being the Opposite-Sex Clone of Wolverine, makes this even more noticeable, considering Logan's already one of the top badasses. While Laura's height in relation to Wolverine varies, she's consistently depicted as a slender (or at her heaviest athletic) teenage girl. She's also faster than him (not weighed down by 100lbs of adamantium), heals more quickly (her Healing Factor is not impacted by a full adamantium skeleton like Logan's), was raised from birth to be a living weapon, has extensive espionage and black ops training, was a professional assassin with the body count into the hundreds before she was thirteen, and every time she walks into a room she's already figured out several dozen ways to kill everyone inside it. And she's one of the top martial artists in the 616 'verse and may be an even better fighter than Logan.
  • If you look at the big names in the X-Men generally, the women won the Super Power Lottery even bigger than the men. Storm can destroy you with all the fury the weather can deliver. Rogue has a potentially deadly touch and can copy powers, as well as being a Flying Brick normally. Jean Grey is one of the most powerful psychics and telekinetics ever to exist. And that’s not even counting the Superpowered Evil Side she has sometimes.

Comic Strips

• The Outbursts of Everett True: When Everett tries to go up against his wife every once in a while, he frequently ends up as the one on the receiving end.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): It gets mentioned that when Thor's mate was alive long ago, she'd always been a better combatant than him and he was attracted to her by her strength of character.
• The Desert Storm: In Night, Ben challenges a group of warlords to Trial by Combat. Out of all the warlords that Ben fights, the lone female of the group ends up being the hardest to beat. Unlike the others, she doesn’t underestimate Ben and uses a mace rather than fight unarmed like Ben’s previous opponents, and while she's the smallest of the group, she's far better at actually using her mass to her advantage. Tellingly, she inflicts the most damage onto Ben out of all four warlords.
• In Incarnation of Legends, Ryoma is a formidable Level 4 Adventurer and a Master Swordsman, but he's small pickings compared to his companion and lover Oryou, who is feared as the Level 6 Mizuchi.
• The Naruto fanfic Son of the Sannin has this between Zabuza Momochi and Mei Terumi. Make no mistake; Zabuza has more than earned his credentials as one of Kiri's Seven Swordsmen, but still pales compared to Mei. To drive it home, the two had a one-on-one fight over the right to become Mizukage, and she took him down in less than five minutes.
• In Shazam! fanfiction Here There Be Monsters, Mary Marvel argues that Georgia Sivana is nastier and more dangerous than her father — Doctor Sivana — and brother. Her arguments? Georgia is the only Sivana who has actually killed somebody. And she got away with it.
  Mary Marvel: Both of the guys think their Sivana is the worst, but I can tell you, Mom, Georgia has got to be the nastiest one of the pack. She's actually killed somebody, do you know that? Took a newspaper editor and shot him in cold blood. They couldn't pin the rap on her, but we know she did it.
• In The Bridge, of Grogar's four pupils, Queen Chrysalis was the only female one. And yet she caused more longterm damage and civilian deaths than Lord Tirek, Discord, and King Sombra put together.
• The Assassins' Guild School in the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal builds on the bones of the story in canon. Canon tells us the Guild has only just begun to go co-educational. Pessimal builds on this and constructs the back-stories of the first four officially acknowledged Lady Assassins. These four lethal ladies have between them killed possibly a hundred and twenty people.^note At least half this number was accomplished all in one go by Johanna Smith-Rhodes and a very large bomb. And one Troll. After the Guild legitimises the situation by training and enrolling them, they go on to teach the first generation of girl students. Who prove their dedication to the Profession is at least the equal of the boys. One of the School's all-female houses even has the motto: Black Widow — deadlier than the male.
  • Elsewhere in the Pessimal AU, there is the Ankh-Morpork City Air Watch. Air Policewomen most of the time; a combat Air Force when needed; and Witches all the time. When training for air combat, their Rodinian commanders and leaders instruct them that there are no half-measures in air fighting. first the Gentry find this out the hard way, and most lately the Klatchians.
• It is stated often in Luz Belos: Princess of the Boiling Isles that while Belos certainly commands a presence, people seem to find his non-magic human wife Camilia much more terrifying as far as Luz is concerned.
• In Infinity Train: Seeker of Crocus, Chloe Cerise is a girly girl with red hair and a pipe but she is a dangerous little girl with red hair and a pipe. As proven in the Ninjala Car, the cloak she wears is infused with the power of a god and demon and her Flamethrower alone destroyed half an army. In the final battle of Act 1, she's off against her former bully powered by the Unown while Professor Sycamore's Shadow and Specter are watching in horror as the fight gets brutal with stiff punches, bitch slaps and kicks to the groin all while Chloe roars out lines like, "GET ALL NICE AND SALTY FOR ME!"

Films — Animated

• The Emperor's New Groove has a very comedic example: Yzma is this to Kronk, as both characters used to work with each other rather mischievously, but Kronk himself is proven to be far more saintly than Yzma is, who displays a rather limited sense of moral conscience, even towards him.
• The Lion King (1994): Nala, Simba's best friend and love interest, has easily beaten Simba in all their "fights". She pinned him twice in a row as cubs, and the second time was after Simba tackled her by surprise while she was smirking proudly after the first time. They get into a much more serious fight as adults, and although it seems much more even she still beats him the same way she did the first two times as kids, flipping him in midair and slamming him to the ground pinning him. She might have even killed him if he didn't recognize her from this move. Although Simba does "beat" Nala eventually, pinning her himself, rolling down a hill romantically is hardly considered a fight.
• Meet the Robinsons: DOR-15, or "Doris", is qualifiable to be considered as such (despite not being technically feminine in the biological perspective) since she's proven herself to be a lot more dangerous than her partner-in-crime, the Bowler Hat Guy (who is actually the vengeful Mike Yagoobian, Lewis' old roommate). Just take a good look at the movie's climax.
• Played with in The Bad Guys (2022) with Diane Foxington, aka. the Crimson Paw, who was the most notorious criminal in Sunnyside, having never been caught and mirroring all five of the Bad Guys' signature abilities to some palpable level. Her Establishing Character Moment is single-handedly curbstomping every officer in a maximum security prison. Where the trope becomes hazy however is that Diane ultimately gave up the criminal life out of guilt and became Governor to help clear up the city, only to find out that being the number one thief doesn't neccessary mean she can snuff out other criminals as easily (as shown when the Bad Guys and Marmalade outsmart her). It is only when taking the role of a Magnetic Hero that Diane begins to gain control of the plot.

Films — Live-Action

• Alien: There really isn't much evidence that Xenomorphs have genders, being implicitly asexual or hermaphroditic. However, it's common in the Expanded Universe to explicitly describe the huge, powerful Queen as a female and the "Praetorians" or Drones/Warriors as males, who mate with the much larger and stronger Queen to help her produce eggs. A Dark Horse novel/comic, Rogue, involves an attempt by a Mad Scientist to genetically engineer a "King Alien", the titular Rogue, who is mindlessly violent and aggressive, slaughtering every other Xenomorph it encounters — until it meets the Queen, which is smaller but smarter, quicker and more agile, quickly tearing the King apart.
• Bumblebee: Shatter is a far more vicious and skilled opponent than her partner Dropkick, and could have killed Bee in their final fight were it not for her hubris.
• Clue: Col. Mustard directly quotes Kipling during dinner. Miss Scarlet and Mrs. Peacock are the sole murderers in the first and second endings respectively (with Yvette assisting in the first ending), and in the third ending Scarlet, Peacock, and Mrs. White all killed someone.
• The Fast and the Furious: Despite the series being an epitome of manliness, the series' most dangerous villain by far is Cipher, a cyberterrorist and computer goddess who is the Greater-Scope Villain of three films, and is the Big Bad herself of two other films. While the bad guys of other films are either local or regional threats, Cipher wants to bend the entire world to her will, and will stop at nothing to achieve it. Despite the heroes thwarting her plans, she is still at large and has not received any comeuppance whatsoever.
• Meta variant in The Jungle Book (2016); Kaa in this version is female and notably more competent than her 1967 film counterpart (though far less so than her book counterpart, who happens to be male — granted, Book!Kaa was basically the Yoda of snakes). Justified on a biological level, too — female snakes in real life do indeed tend to be bigger, stronger and more aggressive than their male counterparts.
• Jurassic Park shows several dangerous predatory dinosaurs. And the T. rex, as well as the Velociraptors and the Indominus rex were all females.
• In Kick-Ass 2 the strongest fighter with the highest body count was a woman, both among the superheroes and among the supervillains. Namely Hit-Girl and Mother Russia.
• In Kung Fu Hustle, the Landlady is clearly the boss of Pig Sty Alley and henpecks her husband despite him also being a powerful kung fu master. While most other martial artists require the combatants to get in close range, the Landlady's Lion Roar allows her to obliterate foes from a distance.
• The Magnificent Seven (2016): Emma is the most deadly out of everyone in Rose Creek, being the best shooter, and this is even before the villagers were trained by the Seven.
• My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To: While hunting people to feed Thomas is mostly Dwight’s responsibility, Jessie proves to be very proficient at it and doesn’t suffer remorse like he does.
• Parasite (2019): Kim Chung-sook is absolutely ruthless in a fight, and in fact it is she who rather brutally kills Geun-se after he's stabbed Ki-jeong, and who delivers one of the fatal blows to Moon-gwang by pushing her down the stairs, arguably making her the deadliest of the Kim family. When Ki-taek grabs her by the collar and jokingly pretends that he's about to hit her, she doesn't even flinch, and when he says he was just joking, she says she would have killed him if he wasn't.
• Species: According to the team that developed her, the decision was made to make the alien hybrid female "so she'd be more docile and controllable". A female scientist observes that "You don't get out much, do you?" Species II subverts this, however; it turns out that a male hybrid is much more dangerous. The big threat of the hybrids is that they will procreate and overthrow humanity, and that's an area in which males have greater advantages to females since they can impregnate multiple partners in a short timespan. When they metamorphose into their alien forms, the male one is also three times the female's size.
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Rey is better at hand to hand combat than either of her forebears. Justified in that she's spent the last 10-15 years living on her own in a harsh environment where she Had to Be Sharp. And in that she's very strong in the Force. On the other hand, she's apparently not quite in Kylo Ren's league when it comes to lightsaber combat, as she spends most of their battle on the back foot against Ren despite his already being injured and trying to take her alive, and she only manages to disable him by catching him off-guard with a flurry of attacks.
• In Thor: Ragnarok the modern day Asgardian army (introduced as of the first Thor movie and onwards) is overwhelmingly male, so it's perhaps surprising to learn that the strongest and most ruthlessly insane, violent and deadly warrior and military commander in Asgard's entire illustrious history was in fact a woman. Even Thor himself seems to drastically underestimate his long-lost sister Hela's strength (especially in comparison to his own due to her being much physically smaller and more slender than him), not to mention her crazy blood lust when he first meets her, thinking that he can defeat and subdue her using Mjölnir alone. He learns what a terrible mistake in judgment he's made when she swiftly catches the magic hammer like it's absolutely nothing and crushes it single-handedly. Hela's insanity, use of excessive violence and Blood Knight Galactic Conqueror tendencies show what a terrible ruler she would be.
• The female vampires in We Are the Night also qualify. It is mentioned that the female vampires killed all of the male vampires two hundred years before the plot. They also vowed to never turn men into vampires again, so that there would only be women among them (although in an alternative scene the heroine of the film turns a man she loves into a vampire).
  • In the book it is a bit inverted because it shows that the male vampires are much stronger than the female vampires. To the point that one vampire man fights three vampire women and the fight ends roughly in a draw. However, that doesn't change the fact that he is one of the last male vampires, and the others were almost all killed by the female vampires.

Literature

• From "The Wallenstein Gambit", a short story set in the 1632 universe, after an American woman serving as his nurse helps ward off a coup attempt:
  Wallenstein: A pity there are so few American women. If I had an army of you mad creatures, I could conquer the world.
  • Julie Mackay (nee Sims) and Gretchen Higgins (nee Richter) embody this trope. The former is a Friendly Sniper who was almost disturbingly cheerful about blowing off men's heads before she had graduated high school. The latter has become the leader of a powerful revolutionary movement, and figures prominently in the nightmares of much of Europe's nobility. She herself has yet to turn 30.
    • By contrast Julie cries when she shoots deer. After all deer don't Rape, Pillage, and Burn.
• If you saw Rachel of Animorphs you would never guess that Ms. Fashion, the graceful girl who looks like a model and loves shopping is Xena, Warrior Princess, a blood-thirsty killer.
• Opal Koboi, the main recurring villain in the Artemis Fowl series — other than the protagonist — follows this trope. Like Artemis, she's a greedy and manipulative scheme-happy evil genius; unlike Artemis, who has some moral principles, she's a homicidal maniac. Artemis eventually develops into more of an Anti-Hero; simultaneously, Opal goes even further off the deep end, eventually attempting to Kill All Humans and become an evil overlord of the fairies.
• The Atomic Time of Monsters: The Kaiju Tyranta is generally more aggressive and less friendly than her mate Tyrantis.
• This is pretty explicitly part of the worldbuilding in the Black Jewels series by Anne Bishop: the culture is matriarchal, with males serving females as guardians and protectors; but females generally have more powerful (or at least more deadly) magic, and one character even says outright, albeit half joking, that the reason males serve is because "you're deadlier when you're angry" and at least if they go down first the males won't have to deal with them when their tempers are roused.
• Blood & Chocolate: The male fights for alpha are planned meticulously and widely announced. The fights for the alpha's mate, on the other hand, begin with no ceremony and are expected to be lethal.
• In The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, women are forbidden from joining the Torturer's Guild because they are considered too vicious.
• According to Sapper, after battling the mysterious master criminal Carl Peterson through four books and finally killing him, Bulldog Drummond is challenged by Peterson's female associate Irma in the book Female of the Species (1928). Nearly forty years later, there was a film, Deadlier Than The Male (1967), in which the lead character is also called Bulldog Drummond, but he bears little relation to the original.
• The Conquerors Saga, an Alternate History where Vlad the Impaler was a woman, has Lada Dracul recruit women to serve in her army specifically because they've suffered far more under the Ottoman regime and boyars than the men have. While her male advisers often object to her more extreme actions, such as staking 20,000 Muslims, the women support her completely.
• In The Dark Tower series novel "Wolves of the Calla", the Calla have a lady Oriza who is an in-universe legend. After her husband was murdered, she had a nude dinner with the conqueror. When the time was right, she took the sharpened dinner plate, threw it and took his head off.
• Discworld:
  • Lady Sybil has hints of this. She was raised properly, but that means she almost never has a chance to let off steam, and is occasionally very interested in violence...
  • Compare the male wizards and the female witches (ESPECIALLY Granny Weatherwax).
  • In particular amongst the witches we have Magrat Garlick, who is compared to a small furry animal in overall demeanor, and she isn't easily angered — but as Witches Abroad and Lords and Ladies prove, sometimes a cornered small furry animal turns out to be a mongoose
  • In Guards! Guards!, we find an unexpected example at the climax. Lady Sybil deduced the literal Dragon — the ruling Ankh-Morpork through fear, is female.
  • The Lady Assassins can be quite inventively nasty. Witness Alice Band's cure for over-confidence — sending students on doomed assignments to target Sam Vimes. And Lady T'Malia's armory of poison-dealing jewelry.
  • Invoked in spirit in Monstrous Regiment, when Polly bites her lip at Wazzer's assertion that Borogravia would be peaceful and happy if women were in charge and reminisces on how, in her experience, women seemed to be the most likely gender to tattle on others for breaking Nuggan's Abominations — especially if the guilty parties were younger, prettier women — and were usually the first ones to show up for floggings and executions so they could get the best seats. Polly's cynicism is further justified when it turns out that at least a third of the Borogravian military High Command is made up of women in disguised, and they have made no effort to try and end the pointless bloodshed. This is something lampshaded by Jackrum, himself a Brawn Hilda who has been masquerading as a male sergeant for years, when he confesses to Polly that he had hoped the other Sweet Polly Olivers he had helped over his career might use their positions to try and bring some sanity back to the country, only for them to be if anything worse than the men they were pretending to be. And then, just to hammer things home, it's implied the women were all behind High Command starting the war all over again at the story's epilogue.
• The Dresden Files: Briefly mentioned in the first book, Storm Front. Harry believes that women are simply able to feel a stronger hatred toward someone than men are. It should be borne in mind that he's a bit of a sexist at first and this likely stems from the fact that he's got severe trust issues after an incident with his first love, Elaine, who he believes tried to mind control him. He also thinks that she's dead. As it turns out, she's alive and she did, sort of, but she was mind controlled at the time. But even after that, he's proven somewhat right in that we got Charity, Murphy, Mab and Lea, and Lara to prove that the ladies of the verse tend towards being more dangerous when provoked than the males.
• A recurring villain in the Dr Watson At War novels by Robert Ryan is Ilse Brandt, a psychopathic agent for German Naval Intelligence. She and other women were trained (including a Deadly Graduation) at the Sie Wölfe school as spies and assassins at a time when women were not expected to kill.
• Bene Gesserit Lady Jessica, Hot Consort to Duke Leto Atreides in Dune. As both Thufir Hawat and Fremen naib Stilgar find out the hard way.
• Ellana in Pierre Bottero's Ellana, in the second part, where Rhous Ingan says that little girls (Ellana is 15) can't fight (or use bows). Later that day she shoots to death 10 Rais.
• In the Emberverse, the single deadliest warrior in the Portland Protective Association is Tiphaine d'Ath. She is strong, lethally quick, clever, and an absolute Combat Pragmatist. According to her, the fact that she doesn't waste time posturing and flourishing, as a male noble would, is a tremendous advantage.
• Graduates of Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing School are expected to be this.
• One of the Marines in Generation Kill unconsciously echoes Kipling when the women of an Iraqi town emerge from their huts, unarmed, to verbally berate the heavily armed Marines, while the men stay hidden.
  "If we had to fight the women, dawg, we wouldn't stand a fuckin' chance."
• In Greenmantle, Hilda von Einem is a brilliant and ruthless chessmaster, and more dangerous than any of the male antagonists. Blenkiron explicitly gives it as his opinion that a man would not have been able to achieve what she has done.
• Female dragons in Harry Potter are bigger and more aggressive than male ones. This is how Charlie Weasley figured out that Hagrid's pet dragon Norbert was actually Norberta.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar novel Owlsight, the local lord and his son head out into the field to assist in commanding the defense against a possible barbarian invasion, leaving the lady of the keep behind to oversee the village evacuees. This is for two reasons: she can keep the refugees busy helping plan her son's wedding, and she's as good or better at castle defense than her husband, "and that's why I married her." Their son is rather surprised to hear that one.
  • In the Vows and Honor series of the same universe, a local lord comes to believe this after witnessing Kethry use magic to kill a man with his own poison. Tarma and Kethry themselves are kind and honorable people, but they're also very powerful, ruthless in battle, and prefer to Pay Evil unto Evil. The short story is even called "A Woman's Weapon", first referring to poison, then to the women's tendency to never give in until they get justice.
• In the Honor Harrington series, pirate captains are usually male. There are female pirate captains, however, and they tend to be a lot nastier than their male counterparts.
• In Death series: Rapture In Death has Reanna brag about this trope to Eve. Eve refutes it, however, saying that she thinks ruthlessness and viciousness have no gender.
• In Insurgent Mexico by John Reed, Pancho Villa writes women off as being too weak to make decisive dicisions, but Reed disagrees, telling him that women can be crueller than men. Villa decides to ask his wife what he should do with some prisoners to see how she'll respond, and she tells him to execute them.
• In Jirel of Joiry, the sorceress Jarisme is More Deadly Than the Male to Jirel's Action Girl. When Jarisme threatens a terrible punishment, Jirel thinks briefly on her own torture dungeons but quickly realizes that "It would be a feminine vengeance, and more terrible than anything fire and iron could inflict."
• Rudyard Kipling:
  • The Female of the Species sums this trope up poetically, and attributes it to the hardships of motherhood.
    When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
    He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
    But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
    For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
  • The trope is present in The Jungle Book and Kipling's other writings too: in Mowgli's Brothers, Mother Wolf is much more fiercely protective of Mowgli than Father Wolf, and in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the eponymous mongoose is more cautious around the female cobra Nagaina than her mate Nag.
• In Myth Adventures novel Hit Or Myth, when told his brother is dying, Aahz doesn't believe it, because his brother is a lot tougher than him. Then his nephew claims Dad had gotten into a fight with Mom, and suddenly Aahz is very worried....
• In the Night Watch (Series): Male wizards seem to be more competent in the tasks requiring patience and precision but they are absolutely no match for females when it comes to raw power they are able to unleash. Even mundane women (i.e. ones devoid of any magical talent) have much bigger reserves of the internal magical potential. On the flipside, this makes them preferable target for human sacrifices, as observed in Day Watch.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians the Hunters of Artemis always win in competitions against the other members of Camp Half-Blood. The Hunters of Artemis are all female (almost exclusively teenage girls), while the teenagers in the rest of the camp include both genders.
• The works of James H. Schmitz — to whom the Dark Action Girl heroine was a signature trope — feature this quite a lot. The most notable one may be Telzey Amberdon, a telepathic teenage genius who unrelated adults find frankly terrifying.
• Six of Crows: Inej and Nina of the titular group are both sweet, friendly girls, but they also both act as the muscle and are considerably more dangerous than the rest of their male counterparts. Inej is a spy that is basically a ninja and Nina, as a Heartrender, is capable of manipulating bodies of people stronger than her and put them out easily. This can be compared to the men of the crew, where Kaz is a good fighter, but primarily the strategic brains; Wylan is a gadget guy responsible for giving them bombs; Jesper is a sharpshooter, but not an up-close fighter; and Matthias, who is a physically imposing soldier, but still just a common fighter compared to them.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Cersei Lannister is a subversion of the trope. She think of herself as this, and is certainly more dangerous than her idiot husband, but the series is so overflowing with other manipulators of greater competence than her that she is ultimately outmatched. Note that her inferiority in this field is not implied to be due to her gender, but simply her intelligence and personality.
  • Ultimately subverted with Daenerys Targaryen. She's a 15-year-old girl without any of the martial training male nobles usually receive. To date, she has sacked three separate cities, and has a short way with those who cross her. In A Dance with Dragons, however, while it's clear she started with the best of intentions, her supporters are vastly outnumbered by those who want to overthrow her. All three cities eventually rise up in rebellion.
  • Played straight with Olenna "Queen of Thorns" Tyrell, and she's training her protegee/granddaughter Margaery to be the same.
• Madame DeFarge and Miss Pross in A Tale of Two Cities.
• In Time Scout, Malcolm is frequently surprised and impressed by Margo's ferocity.
• While the Tortall Universe and Circleverse of Tamora Pierce tend more towards Action Girl and Silk Hiding Steel, they don't shy away from this trope either, totaling no less than three female serial killers and even more dangerously ambitious empresses, regents, and assorted female nobles between them. Even the more regressive parts of Tortallan culture consider it the duty of "any delicately reared noblewoman" to defend her fief while the menfolk are away, even to the point of lighting barrels of lard and ordering them catapulted onto enemy ships.
• In Tunnel in the Sky, Deacon Matson goes on a rant to his students that humans are the most deadly animal in existence. He notes that "it goes double for the female".
• Urban Dragon is dominated by these. Leadership all levels is mixed-gender, but the women will always be the scariest by a mile.
  • Small, harmless-looking Arkay is constantly being assaulted by men who think they can take advantage of her, only to beat them within an inch of their lives
  • Nadia is The Dragon to a literal dragon
  • In a mixed council, Archduchess Stavros earned her place as highest ranking by a long history of dragonslaying
  • For being such an elegant lady, the Contessa is just plain scary.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga novel Barrayar:
  • Princess Kareen realizes her son is alive and that she's been lied to. Without hesitation, she draws a nerve disrupter in a room full of soldiers and fires at the usurper who told her that her son was dead, the self-proclaimed Emperor.
  • Despite Aral being a remarkably capable warrior, ultimately Cordelia leads the team that ends the coup attempt and changes the fate of the world...on the way to rescuing her son, her real mission.
• The works of P. G. Wodehouse frequently reference the Rudyard Kipling line.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel:
  • Women usually end up more vicious in similar roles than men, particularly vampires Darla and Drusilla. Note also that Angelus originally got in touch with his sadistic side just to impress Darla.
  • There's a reason Slayers are always women. Dudes have traditionally stayed on the sidelines, from the Shadow Men all the way down to their descendants, the Watcher's council.
• Burn Notice describes Fiona as a "trigger happy ex-girlfriend" in the opening narration. Michael is no slouch himself, but he tries to maintain diplomacy whereas Fiona is a little more eager to jump straight to the "shooting and C4" part of the evening.
• Chinese Paladin 3: A running theme in this show is women being willing to strike first, fight dirty, and take no prisoners if they or their loved ones are threatened. A prime example is Zixuan's setting a monastery on fire as a distraction when her lover is arrested.
• Defiance:
  • The series features the gangster and slum lord Datak Tarr, and his loving wife Stahma... who quickly demonstrates that she is far more cunning and ruthless than her husband. She talks her husband out of killing the entire family of local mine owner Rafe McCawley by pointing out that their son Alak loves Christie McCawley — who would inherit the mines if her father and brother were to have a tragic mining accident.
  • Even Nolan catches onto this during "A Well Respected Man":
    Nolan: I've been watching the wrong snake. You're the dangerous one.
    Stahma: You're very sweet.
  • In Castithan culture, females are expected to be meek and obedient while their husbands are strong and ruthless. Stahma tells Christie, her son's girlfriend, a story about how her fiance "accidentally" fell out an airlock, implying that Datak killed him so they could be together. A later rant changes the context quite a bit.
    Stahma: Once again, the strong Castithan male fails to do what is necessary, and it falls to me to open the airlock door myself!
• Doctor Who:
  • The first two adult companions were Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. That said, while Ian had his awesome moments, Barbara was such a badass it's a common fan joke that the show could have been renamed "Why Barbara is Awesome", and no one would have noticed.
  • Sara Kingdom. When she and Steven are fighting off two guards, she takes care of the one attacking her before stepping in to finish off the one attacking Steven, all without breaking a sweat.
  Sara: Not bad. Remind me to teach you a few tricks sometime.
  Steven: Remind me not to pick a fight with you.
  • Also notable is Fourth Doctor companion Leela, a Noble Savage the Doctor sometimes struggled to physically restrain.
  • Since their reappearance in 2010, the female Silurians have been portrayed as more aggressive than the males. Much like real-life lizards, then.
• A lot of the culprits of the week in Elementary are well-mannered, respectable women who plan and carry out subtle, elaborate murders — and if not for Holmes and Watson's intervention, they'd probably have never been caught. And then there's the series' take on Moriarty.
• Game of Thrones: Though a demure young girl with no propensity for arms, and an openness to non-violent solutions at least on the outset, Daenerys Targaryen is directly and indirectly the possessor of the largest body count in the show.
  • Arya Stark, though one of the youngest leads, is far deadlier and ruthless than all her brothers combined and most male characters. She willingly becomes an assasin, slaughters an entire family as payback for her brother and mother's death and is unflinching when it comes to getting rid of someone.
• Generation Kill the series: One of the Marines says this when he observes the women of a town doing backbreaking labor to clear the streets and their yards of debris, while the men lounged on the lawns smoking:
  "If we had to fight the women, dawg, we wouldn't stand a fuckin' chance."
• Grimm:
  • Hexenbiest are much more powerful, cunning, and dangerous than Zauberbiest, their male counterpart.
  • Female Grimms get their powers decades earlier than male Grimms, meaning they have decades more experience and training at the same age. Also, female descendants are much more likely to inherit Grimm status than male descendants.
• iCarly: "iMake Sam Girlier": Sam's new crush says "And even though I haven't known Sam for too long, I know that if I ever get in a fight and I can have either the football team or Sam back me up, I'm going with Sam."
• Chuck: Threatening the title character will get you beaten up and arrested by Casey. It will get you killed outright by Sarah.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: In Season 2, there was one occasion where Lord Zedd created two monsters at once by using beauty products from Kimberly's mother's purse. The purse itself became a male monster called Pursehead while some lipstick became the female Lipsyncher. Whereas Pursehead was defeated rather humiliatingly by a blast from Saba and a few kicks from Tommy, Lipsyncher proved far more resilient to the point that she had the upper hand on Jason, the original leader of the team before the other rangers arrived to help him out.
• The Prisoner (1967) is notable for the three episodes in which Number Two is female being the ones in which Number Six ends up most defeated and the closest to being mentally broken.
• Revolution: Rachel Matheson. She may not look like Action Girl material at all, and in fact, seems willing to put up with loads of hardships. But the minute her kids or her life get threatened...well, there's nothing that she won't do to ensure survival. Her former colleague Dr. Bradley Jaffe in "Kashmir" and Sergeant Will Strausser in "Nobody's Fault But Mine" learned this at the cost of their lives.
• Smallville:
  • Clark Kent may be a Physical God, but being such a boy scout, he might just be less dangerous than Lana Lang and Chloe Sullivan. Lana enacted a complex and vicious plan of revenge after Lex Luthor faked her pregnancy, which includes beating up and imprisoning Lionel. Chloe delivered an If You Ever Do Anything To Hurt Him speech to Lana with a very convincing tone; if you are the week's bad guy who tried to expose Clark to the world and she is under the influence of Brainiac, you won't live long enough to regret it.
  • Jonathan would come at you with a shotgun if you try to hurt his loved ones. Martha would come up with an elaborate gambit and finish off with a Evil Cannot Comprehend Good speech that induced a Villainous Breakdown in the Dark Action Girl.
• Star Trek:
  • The original Green Skinned Space Babes, the Orion slavegirls, are far deadlier than the males and are the true rulers of their world thanks to their pheromones.
  • According to Klingon creation myth the first Klingon was male, and the second was female and stronger because the gods had a better idea what they were doing now. They fought for a time, until the female convinced the male that together they would be strong enough to destroy the gods themselves. Which they then did. This story is recited at Klingon weddings as the ideal, just before the husband's friends attack the pair to give them some Battle Couple cred.
• On Sweet/Vicious, the women are some of the most fearsome characters on the show.
  • On the heroic side, we have the protagonists Jules and Ophelia, two college girls and Vigilante Women who are each, in their own way, vastly more dangerous than most of the boys on campus. The only guys who ever really stood a chance against them were either athletes or people who had the jump on them.
  • On the evil side, we have the Kappa Kappa Phi sorority, run by the Alpha Bitch Chloe and her two Beta Bitches, both named Lindsay. Not only are they able to hold their own in hand-to-hand combat with Jules and Ophelia far better than most of their male targets, but the scope of their evil deeds is far more widespread. While most of Jules and Ophelia's rapist targets are assaulting individual girls, the Kappas are systematically abusing dozens of girls at a time over the course of Hell Week (and presumably even after that), and profiting from their heinous actions to the tune of twenty thousand dollars a week by secretly filming it for a fetish site.
• That '70s Show: The guys taunt Donna and Jackie with claims that while men can entertain themselves with play-fighting, girls get too angry and begin to fight for real. Cue the girls beginning a nice, playful fight that quickly descends to barbed words and legitimate violence.
• The Investigation Discovery channel has ab entire series dedicated to women who murdered their husbands, called The Wife Did It.
  • The same channel's Deadly Women also profiles many real-life stories of women who offed their husbands or boyfriends. As the emcee of the series, former FBI profiler Candice DeLong, explains in one episode:
    Women are far more likely than men to get away with murder, because they're rarely suspected.

Music

• Space's Signature Song, 'Female Of The Species', which takes its title from the Kipling poem above.
• Emilie Autumn's "Fight Like a Girl" is a call to arms for this archetype of girl, in which she champions a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against 49% of the world's population^note  surprisingly not misandry since she has lines that refer to men as allies — it's more about those who are misogynist and saying they are the outnumbered ones, based on ruthlessness as well as superior numbers.
  It's so easy to kill
  This I learned from watching you
  If I have to, I will
  It's not pretty but it's true
• In This Moment: The topic of the title track from the Black Widow album.
• The Walker Brothers sang an ode to the poem, though it's more playful than anything.
• Dar Williams' "Flinty Kind Of Woman" is about the local women on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge Pedo Hunt:
  "There was no time fooling with the trifles
  There was no use telling the men
  They would just go running for their rifles
  And then once you got him couldn't get him again

Religion

• The Bible: In Judges 4, an Israelite woman named Jael invites Canaanite captain Sisera to take shelter in her tent. She gives him milk to drink, and then while he sleeps, she drives a nail through his temples. With his death, Israel is freed from Canaanite captivity.
  • Judith does much the same thing to an invading general, going into his tent, then giving him strong drink and, once he's gone to sleep, beheading him.

Tabletop Games

• In the Warhammer 40,000 setting, the Sisters of Battle are easily the most fanatical of all the various military forces of the Imperium.

Toys

• The small, frail female Skrall in BIONICLE are said to be far more dangerous than their larger, brutish male counterparts, in part due to their Psionic powers which can potentially destroy one's mind.
  • A mild subversion: While the above is true, those powers aren't natural, and the Cosmic Horror that gifted them with said capabilities uses them as his relatively weak-minded pawns.
  • However this is actually a commonly used trope in the series. Female Vortixx and Skakdi are also a lot more dangerous than the males, a stark contrast to the "girls are peaceful" stereotype applied in previous years. This has of course lead a couple of fans to believe that there are barely any normal females in the Bionicle universe.

Video Games

• Olga from Asura's Wrath is much more vindictive and cruel than most of the other Deities, being merely subservient to Deus out of true admiration then true subservience most of the time. Subverted when around Asura, especially when he turns into his berserker form, which makes her high tail it and try to use their ultimate weapon on him. She also outlives Deus and tries to kill Mithra when Deus dies.
• A premium scene in Blades of Light & Shadow has Raine help Nia recover her bracelet back from kromps. Females are the venomous ones, though Raine's lucky they're only bit by a male while recovering the bracelet.
  • Also, female orcs are stated to be stronger than the males, which is why orcish society is matriarchal.
• Cave Story has Misery, the right-hand witch of the Big Bad. While her "partner" Balrog, despite his incredible strength and some mischiefs (like killing puppies under their owner's eyes to get informations), is only dangerous because he's under the crown's control, this same curse is what keeps Misery from being more dangerous than she already is: her mischiefs include abuse on her partner she doesn't seem to consider as more than an attack dog, using an innocent girl as a guinea pig for a deadly experiment, and forcing a powerful sorcerer to create the McGuffin she's bound to, kickstarting the entire plot of the game.
• In about three of the Deception series of games (known as the Kagero series in Japan) features a female main character who is not an Action Girl by any stretch of imagination, but instead was given a castle full of traps, and a complementary Trap Master traits to go along with it. Chaining insane, bloody and gory combos with your ever-increasingly lethal and convoluted trap sequence is par for the course. The oddly-named Trapt (Kagero II: Dark Illusion in Japan) has a Princess doing this.
• Deltarune: Chapter 2's Arc Villain, Queen, is not as evil as Chapter 1's King, but she more than makes up for it by being willing to play as active of an antagonistic role as King's son Lancer does, conjure better-laid plans to stop the heroes than anyone in Chapter 1 does, rope you into a Punch-Out!!-esque Humongous Mecha fight where violence is uniquely your sole recourse, destroy your Combining Mecha regardless of the gameplay outcome, and come within an inch of convincing Noelle, Berdly, and Susie to continue her misguided conquest.
• In Diner Dash Adventures, the real power behind the BigCorp is Vera Big, Mr. Big's mother, whose approval he desperately seeks, to no avail. Among his employees, the most ruthless and clearly evil is Beatrix, the only female; Flip is a Minion with an F in Evil, while Devon is often too preoccupied with admiring himself to be too much of a bother.
• Silhouette boasts this when she challenges Crypto in Destroy All Humans!.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, this is a trait of the Aureals (aka Golden Saints) and Mazken (aka Dark Seducers), two forms of lesser Daedra in service to Sheogorath. Each has a matriarchal, militaristic society, and, for the Aureal as race, they are haughty, arrogant, quick to anger, and cruel in their punishment. The females are significantly more powerful than the males.
• Happens twice in E.V.O.: Search for Eden. The first time it's the Queen Bee, the final boss of chapter 2. The second time it's the Female Yeti, the final boss of Chapter 4. The reason that they attack you is because you defeated their mates.
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, any of the female companions classify. Veronica and her power fist are much more dangerous than most of what the Brotherhood has to offer and Cass... Let's just say she one ups her father on that front.
  • The female NCR Ranger, Stella, captured by the Legion. Forced to fight in the arena, she's been tearing up hardened legionaries with her bare hands ever since.
  • Colonel Cassandra Moore is by far the most bloodthirsty of the NCR’s commanders.
  • One of Fallout 4's add on Nuka-World 's raider gangs, the Disciples, is predominantly female, and they are by far the most bloodthirsty of the gangs. Specializing in blades, the Disciples are known to go against the already shaky peace agreement between the Nuka-World raiders and kill members of the other gangs, with their only rule being to not get caught.
• Elena from Final Fantasy VII is the only female member of the Turks, and though she is only ever fought once in the game (in an optional battle to boot), she outstrips her male cohorts Rude and Reno in terms of virtually every stat.
  • This is also true for her Final Fantasy VII Rebirth counterpart, who is also the most dangerous of the four Turks both in and out of battle.
• Male Locust Drones in Gears of War are human-sized and carry guns. Female Drones — a.k.a. Berserkers — are enormous hulking beasts with bulletproof armour plating for skin, blind, and fuelled by Unstoppable Rage making them kill human and Locust alike. Normally the only way to even hurt them is by breaking out the Kill Sat.
• One of the playable choices among the "fans" in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number are the brother/sister pair Alex and Ash. Ash, the brother, uses firearms like a reasonable person (reasonable by psychotic killer standards, anyway). Alex, on the other hand, opts for a chainsaw.
• Oddly enough, invoked by Atton Rand in the second Knights of the Old Republic. He mentions that Sith men are bad enough, but Sith women are much worse. Kreia proves it.
• League of Legends: Xayah, a "marksman" whose partner is a support. Her partner Rakan even has a line for this. "I'm not gonna kill you...she is."
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Gerudo guards (who are all women) are the only enemies that adult Link will surrender to.
• In Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, there are two Thwomps that the Bros. encounter on top of Yoshi Mountain, Mr. Thwomp and Ms. Thwomp. Mr. Thwomp does nothing but make passive-aggressive taunts at you and help you throughout the following stage. Ms. Thwomp, however, challenges you to a full-on boss fight against her, and it's certainly not an easy fight.
• Mass Effect:
  • Male party members have a tendency to be calm and rational by comparison to a cast that includes Liara, Jack, Morinth, Samara, and Ashley.
  • FemShep applies when compared to her male squadmates, potentially lampshaded by Wrex's "Who'd win in a fight?" elevator chitchat. Does not apply when compared with MaleShep as they are equals by design.
• In the Metroid universe, the Space Pirates do not fear the Federation troopers. Samus Aran is their personal Nightmare Fuel. When Evil Counterpart Dark Samus appears, their response is essentially, "Oh God, there are two of them now."
• Monster Hunter zig-zags with various related-species and subspecies.
  • First Generation Monsters: The female Rathian, for instance, is often introduced to players sooner than the male Rathalos, and Rathian does not fly around nearly as much or use her fire breath as vigorously. The rather unnerving and perpetually aggressive Diablos species, however, has the even scarier Black Diablos subspecies, which consists entirely of female Diablos who are in heat, in World it's usually Black Diablos who comes out on top on Turf Wars against normal Diablos.
  • Third Generation Monsters: Zig-zagged with the Jaggias, which are female versions of the Jaggis that are stronger and bigger but in turn are still smaller than their alpha, the Great Jaggi.
  • Fourth Generation Monsters: The Seltas Queen is by far more dangerous than her male counterparts, trading off the speed of them in exchange for a highly armored body capable of withstanding several times more punishment than her squishy male counterpart. To further this point, Seltas Queen can employ her lesser male brood as mere servants and kill them for either attacks or sustainance.
  • Fifth Generation Monsters:
    • While initially the trope wasn't at play with Lunastra and Teostra in the second-generation games (since the former was a weaker version of the latter back then), in World Lunastra is made distinct from her mate Teostra in several ways. Instead of blastblight and fireballs, she carpets the ground in persistent blue flames that cause steady environmental heat damage and will splash out smaller flames if struck by a fire-element attack. She can also coordinate with her mate to cast the double supernova, which causes a rapid health drain for any hunter caught in its massive area of effect; even the fireproof mantle is only partially effective, and the damage can also overpower gradual healing effects. Last but not least, Lunastra actively protects Teostra in a hyper-aggressive manner, not even Nergigante can stand in her way when she is determined enough.
    • Thunder Serpent Narwa is far more dangerous than her mate, Wind Serpent Ibushi, as she is larger, stronger and has far more powerful control over elements. Like the Seltas Queen, she can consume her mate's energy to grow far stronger and become the apocalyptic Narwa the Allmother.
• Aglaia Lilich from Pathologic. Despite being neither crazy nor blood-thristy, unlike many other known Inquisitors, she is still more willing than any other character in the game to use extemely brutal means in order to stop Sand Plague. There is an extremly striking contrast between her and another powerful figure in the game — Alexander "General Ash" Block, who, unlike her is a deeply honorable officer and gentleman, and is incredibly humane for war veteran.
• In Persona 5, while all of the party members are equally powerful in combat, the girls are generally more ruthless and Hot-Blooded.
• Pokémon:
  • The Meowstic species exhibits such a high level of Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism that the two genders have different movepools. The males have primarily support movepools. The females, on the other hand, have primarily offensive movepools (through level up only though). The female's hidden ability (Competitive) is also offensive-oriented compared to the male's (Prankster), but otherwise, it's downplayed; their stats as well their movepools by TMs as well as from Espurr's are still the same.
  • Combee double-subverts this. While the female is no stronger than the male, it is the only gender that can evolve into Vespiquen. Likewise, female Salandit are the only ones who can evolve to Salazzle, due to the male Salandits starving themselves as revealed in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon's Pokedex entries.
• Of the set of Half-Identical Twins that serve as the antagonists of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica, Alexia is far more dangerous and intelligent than her brother Alfred, who's extremely sadistic but not very competent.
• Undertale:
  • In the True Pacifist route, Toriel effortlessly blows her husband Asgore away with a fireball (although they have equal stats). She then proceeds to chastise him that if he really wanted to free the monsters so badly, he should have used his first human soul to get out of the mountain and killed some people himself rather than playing Orcus on His Throne because he was too indecisive. This is the same Toriel who doted on you at the beginning of the game and seems to be in favor of peace between humans and monsters overall, but Asgore's perceived cowardice disgusts her even more than the fact that he was willing to murder humans.
  • Early in the game you fight a husband/wife pair of warrior dogs. If you kill the wife, the husband will be so distraught that he won't even fight back and dies in a single hit. On the other hand, if you kill the husband first, the wife goes berserk on you, gaining a serious boost in attack speed and power.
• In XCOM, both the original game and remake, Mutons are the aliens' shock troopers, heavily-armed and armored Genius Bruisers. The remake also introduces Muton Berserkers, which are twice as tough, twice as fast, and fight exclusively in melee. XCOM 2 reveals that Berserkers are exclusively female, and makes them even larger than their male counterparts, suggesting either substantial sexual dimorphism or genetic tinkering on the Elders' part.
• In Xenogears, Ramsus' right-hand woman Miang shows up in their first couple of boss fights as either his healer or his copilot, never participating in combat directly (you can't even target her if you wanted to). This is almost certainly a ruse, because later on Miang proves to be both more central to the plot and a much bigger threat in gameplay than Ramsus ever was.

Webcomics

• Grace from El Goonish Shive used to have only two modes: complete pacifism and Unstoppable Flying Clawball Of Doom. However, this may have more to do with being a hybrid of a herbivore (squirrel) with a really monstrous alien while having rather limited experience. Later martial artist friends, including ladies, convinced her that it's not always a good idea and she got to learn more controlled ways of violence.
• Get Schooled: The first two arcs are about how brutally boys bully their fellow students and teachers, so Warden Na beats them up to set them straight. The third arc is about a girls' school where psychological bullying is as hellish as, if not more than, the boys' physical bullying. The female Warden Im steps up for the job and is shown to be way less nice compared to Warden Na. The arc's main villain, Yeri Han, is the first antagonist to outright attempt murder several times; she's also the first to be sent to a detention center for her crimes.

Web Original

• According to Cracked's interview with a bouncer named Cronk, women are more dangerous during bar fights than men.
• The Nostalgia Chick might be as pathetic and miserable as the Critic, but her temper is scarier, she can worm her way out of trouble easier, she's stronger than him despite their height difference, and she'll stoop to any level to get what she wants.
• This is true of the Freelancers in Red vs. Blue. While they're all expert fighters, the women tend to either be better or plain more ruthless than their male counterparts.
  • Carolina is The Leader and is ranked number one on the leaderboard until Tex shows up, and often shows the martial ability to back this up. It's notable that she was the Meta's first victim and is still alive into the current seasons.
  • Tex is the resident badass in the Blood Gulch Chronicles, and is shown capable of holding her own in a variety of situations. She's introduced in the Freelancer Saga winning a one-on-three sparring match against York, Wyoming, and Maine, and later on is able to give Washington and the Meta a run for their money in Revelations.
  • South is considerably more bloodthirsty than her brother North, and is shown to be more direct in her approach while he prefers to take up a sniper position. Taken to the extreme that she put her own brother, and later Washington, in a position to be killed by the Meta. Too bad Wash got better.
  • Seemingly subverted in the case of CT, who is either at the bottom of the leaderboard or not on it at all. Though, this might be more because she's secretly working for the Insurrection.
• Worm:
  • Powerful parahumans of both genders abound, but the specific subset of ruthless Well Intentioned Extremists who are willing to trample the lives and free wills of others for the sake of the greater good is a very small group of parahumans, several of whom are opposed to the others, and all of whom are female.
  • Whether the Endbringers can even be considered to have a gender is unclear, but the only one identified as female (due to being shaped like a winged human woman) is the Simurgh. The Simurgh is also considered, by far, the most dangerous Endbringer due to her apparent ability to see the future and set up Disaster Dominoes years in advance, in addition to the destruction she inflicts directly.

Western Animation

• The 7D: Hildegard "Hildy" Gloom has shown more determination in displaying her wickedness than her husband Grim Gloom (who is often portrayed as being rather wimpier than her throughout the show), which includes her ultimate goal of becoming Jollywood's new ruler.
• Adventure Time: The Ice Queen is much more malevolently competent than the Ice King. Justified, as it's a gender-flipped In-Universe fanfiction of the latter, so he probably made her competent regardless of her gender.
• In The Amazing World of Gumball, one episode revolves around Gumball's neighbor's wife being a total sociopath who enjoys making everyone around her miserable. When Gumball and his brother Darwin try to find out why, their neighbor Mr. Robinson speaks a few lines of dialogue from Batman where he says that "some people aren't after anything logical. Sometimes they just want to watch the world burn."
• Avatar: The Last Airbender, as an entire franchise, has a bunch of these.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • While there are very competent male Fire Benders and fighters in her family, Princess Azula plots, schemes, and ruthlessly manipulates others to do her dirty work, before finally bringing out the lightning. And she puts even Daddy to shame with all of her machinations, murder, and mayhem. Best displayed by the fact that she actually managed to kill Aang (though he did get better).
    • Katara can also have shades of this. While she doesn't have the raw power of Aang, she can be downright terrifying when angry. Most notable when she's on the receiving end of chauvinistic comments (things tend to break around her) and when hunting for her mother's killer (where she used bloodbending).
    • Even the Avatars show shades of this. The female Avatars all show signs of being fiercer than the male Avatars are — after all, it's Yangchen and Kyoshi (both female) who outright tell Aang to kill Ozai, whereas Kuruk and Roku (both male) use vague "be decisive, choose your destiny" advice. Kyoshi had such a fierce reputation that she's (falsely) on record as a murderer (she's explicitly killed two people for the record). Korra is also a much more pragmatic Avatar than Aang and doesn't hesitate to kill if she has to.
  • The Legend of Korra follows suit like its predecessor series in regards to some of its female fighters.
    • While the Red Lotus consists of anarchistic benders with unique and unusual abilities, Ming-Hua and P'Li are far more ruthless and vicious in battle than Zaheer and Ghazan. That being said, Ghazan has the most raw destructive force of the group while Zaheer has the most directly lethal application of bending shown onscreen.
    • The Metal Clan has this, inevitably given that the badass genes are from Toph. Two of the males are Non-Action Guys and the other two are satellite characters to Suyin the matriarch in every fight scene.
• In Ben 10: Omniverse, we have Princess Looma Red Wind, a member of the Tetramand species. In her culture, females can only marry those who defeat them in combat because females of the species are larger and stronger than the males. Looma, however, is the smallest Tetramand we see, possibly a runt. Despite this, she still cannot find a husband because no Tetramand can defeat her in combat. She becomes increasingly frustrated with this.
• Castlevania (2017): Carmilla held this opinion and is also the last known of the vampire aristocracy standing after Season 2. Ultimately subverted as while she is a capable villain, she is nowhere near as dangerous as Dracula or Death, and she is cornered and defeated by Hector and Isaac, who are both male.
• in Ed, Edd n Eddy, every single one of the show's main set of female characters are capable of fighting back against any male character, even Nazz (despite the fact that she's the nicest among them).
• The Four Shades of Awesome on Elena of Avalor follow this. Cahu is the leader of the group, and she's also the one who survives the longest. Interestingly enough, she's also the only girl in the group.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Vicky is a huge example of this, especially given that, being a greedy babysitter, she often gives Timmy a miserable life, so it's no wonder why he's very reliant on his fairy godparents Cosmo and Wanda on handling his unfortunate situations with her.
  • Princess Mandie (pronounced as man-die, and not like "Mandy"), who originated from the planet of Boudacia, is a much more dire one, especially given her highly threatening and unpredictably flirtatious personality. She plans to marry Mark Chang, a Yugopatamian prince, just so that she could shove him aside and rule over not only his home planet Yugopatamia, but also the entire universe, all by herself. Ironically, she met her eventual downfall when she had a brief conflict with Vicky (since both female characters have associations with Mark himself), to which the self-proclaimed "mightiest female warrior" got beaten into a pulp by a human being (something that Mark was grateful for).
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy has the ever so stoic Mandy, who despite being the only female member of the show's main trio, is actually the most intimidating among them, to which it even frightens the Grim Reaper himself.
• Shego is easily the most competent villain in Kim Possible's mostly male Rogues Gallery. The made-for-TV movie A Sitch in Time even has it as a plot point that Kim mistakenly believes the main villain in the Bad Future she is trying to avert is Drakken before being informed that it is actually Shego.
  Rufus 3000: Wasn't it clear that Shego was the only one smart enough to take over the world?
  Kim: Uh, well, I guess it always seemed more like a guy thing.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic in general gives that impression, since the majority of characters in the show — including the heroines, some of whom are the most powerful beings in this universe — are female, and male villains repeatedly get soundly beaten by them. There are some examples, though, that really stand out.
  • While Shining Armor's power is already impressive in its own right (he was capable of creating a force field large enough to envelop the whole capital and powerful enough to repel an entire alien invasion), his wife Princess Cadance is much more powerful than him, as she's a pegasus who became an alicorn while he is just a unicorn. She is able to conjure even more powerful force fields than can protect the entire Crystal Empire and hold-off and hurt King Sombra and has large variety of other powerful magic based on crystals and The Power of Love.
  • Also, during the Changeling invasion of Canterlot, the Mane Six (all mares) fare much better in battle against the attackers than Royal Guard stallions, who (as usual) fail to offer any meaningful resistance and get curb-stomped pretty easily.
  • A secondary heroine named Daring Do (an Indiana-Jones-slash-Lara-Croft Expy) is visibly stronger and more skilled in combat than her arch-nemesis Doctor Caballeron or any of his (exclusively male) thugs. The only reason they pose any threat to her is because they attack in group, while Daring Do tends to act solo.
  • In terms of villians however, this trope is subverted. King Sombra, Discord, The Pony Of Shadows and Lord Tirek are all among the most powerful characters in the show with all of them having Person of Mass Destruction- level powers and Antagonist Abilities that not even the female Alicorns and the Mane 6 can match. They need the Elements Of Harmony to stand a chance against them. Additionally, the female villians of the show are much weaker compared to them as well. Queen Chrysalis is quite powerful in her own right as she was able to defeat Princess Celestia, but she doesn't quite have the destructive capability of the aforementioned male villians. Once she loses her army, her threat level also becomes practically non-existent showing that in actuality she is not too impressive power-wise. Starlight Glimmer is a very smart and powerful Unicorn, who is able to cast extremely powerful and rare spells such as time-travelling and cutie-mark manipulation. However, at her core she is still a mortal Unicorn and as shown in Season 9, King Sombra is able to take control of her quite easily. Meanwhile, Cozy Glow is just a normal pegasus filly. She is all brains no brawn. Nightmare Moon, despite being a Mad God who is able to bring The Night That Never Ends, was merely the Starter Villain of the series and the Mane 6 took her out quite easily.
  • The most powerful non-alicorn wizard in Equestrian history was a stallion named Star Swirl the Bearded, and when the main heroine Twilight Sparkle is fighting the Pony of Shadows, the latter remarks that she is merely "almost" as strong as her idol. However, this gets flipped in the series finale, when Lord Tirek — who previously was completely impervious to Star Swirl's attacks and became even more powerful by draining his magic — gets easily knocked to the ground by Twilight's magic blast during the climactic battle.
• Reboot: Hexadecimal was always far more powerful than her brother Megabyte, both in terms of physical strength and viral abilities, with his only real advantage being smarter, more focused, and sane. Her insanity, fickle nature, and crush on the protagonist were the only things keeping her from outright obliterating the whole Mainframe.
• In Regular Show, it's revealed in "The Real Thomas" that "Thomas" himself is actually a Russian spy named Nikolai who works with Natalia, another Russian spy whose pseudonym is simply "Natalie", in order to bring the Park into Russia as a piece of territory from the United States (under the orders of the KGB) for international provocation. However, Thomas was able to overcome his purpose as a ruthless spy with the help of the Park gang, but Natalia didn't, so naturally they fought against each other for that matter (which ironically resulted in her abrupt demise). Keep in mind that right after the espionage revelation, Natalia was also keeping the entire Park gang in captive.
• In Samurai Jack, Jack and his friend The Scotsman are off on a quest to save the Scotsman's wife, a good head taller and bit wider than the muscular Scotsman, from being sacrificed by some demons. Jack and the Scotsman get to her, nagging about their lateness and pathetic fighting styles, and get her to the main hall where they are surrounded by hundreds of demons. Jack and the Scotsman fight to their last bit of energy when the Demon Lord orders his people to kill them and put the "fat one" back in the pot. The Scotsman's wife does not take kindly to being called that, so she jumps into the battle alone beating back every single demon before taking down the Demon Lord himself.
• South Park: From "Moss Piglets" until "Splatty Tomato", Heidi Turner becomes Eric Cartman's Distaff Counterpart after dating Cartman for so long. However everyone seems to fear Heidi more than Cartman (including Cartman himself), since Heidi was much more intelligent than Cartman and could actually follow through with her threats. Luckily, she goes back to her Nice Girl self after breaking up with Cartman, but the fact she could have much more sway than Cartman is scary to think about:
  Heidi: The point is, if the school administration doesn't cancel the science fair, I will see to it they are all fired for discrimination!
  Mr. Mackey: She's kind of like Cartman, but with the ability to follow through.
  (Beat)
  P.C. Principal: Oh, dude. Bro...
• In an episode of Time Squad, the heroes have to help henpecked husband Napoleon Bonaparte sneak away from his wife to do some late-night conquering. Eventually they're caught by her and, being the "fiery frenchwoman" that she is, she gets so mad that she singlehandedly obliterates Napoleon's army. They then decide to become conquering partners together.
• Lord Hater is the Big Bad of Wander over Yonder until Lord Dominator shows up. She gets her jollies by destroying every planet in the galaxy. After she's destroyed everything except for a tiny little planet where the heroes are plotting to defeat her, she starts to feel very sad and depressed...because there's nothing left to destroy. She's so evil that during the series finale, Lord Hater teams up with Wander and his friends to defeat her because she's destroyed the galaxy he wanted to conquer. After she's finally defeated, she almost seems to want to be Wander's friend and become a good guy for a few moments, but then she decides she'd rather storm off in a huff instead.

Real Life

• British General Lord Charles Cornwallis is quoted as saying: "We may destroy all the men in America, and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women."
• The tricoteuses of The French Revolution (as Burke called them, "All the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women"), which inspired the creation of Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.
• Wendi Deng Murdoch protected her husband from a dangerous pie-thrower by going for his throat.
• Female domestic abusers of male partners are statistically more likely to use weapons. Of course, this makes sense given the strength difference.
• Women are also more likely than men to use poison as a method of murder. In past centuries, this, combined with the idea that the "fairer sex" was incapable of something like murder, resulted in some women becoming serial killers, claiming multiple victims undetected.
• In military basic training, female drill sergeants seem far meaner than male drill sergeants. And if they're also short, well...
• Common among any wild animal with Mama Bear tendencies. Indeed, said Mama Bear tendencies may be the reason this form of sexual dimorphism exists in the first place; the female of the species is usually the one carrying the young before their actual birth (even egg-laying species have to wait for the eggs to develop within them before laying them), and as such is the one who is most vital to their offspring's existence. If the male is either absent or dies protecting his brood then the loss is not as great, but if the pregnant female dies, so does her offspring and the next generation is over before it even begins.
• The Trope Namer exists because male bears are not only absent fathers but murderous suitors that will attempt to kill any existing cubs on the assumption they belong to a rival. As such, a Mama Bear needs to be able to deal with any threat against her cubs, including aggressive males seeking to mate with her. Other species, such as Lions, are known for wiping out the young of their rivals.
• Spiders. Females are larger, are more aggressive, have more potent venom than males, and are prone to eating males after mating or if they don't feel like mating. There are a few exceptions:
  • Male diving bell spiders are larger than females.
  • Male Allocosa brasiliensis wolf spiders are larger and will eat females they encounter who are too young or too old to bear young.
  • Male Sydney funnel web spiders are more aggressive and have more potent venom than females. In fact, bites by females are hardly ever fatal while bites by males usually require anti-venom. However, males still risk getting eaten by females.
  • For the desert spider Stegodyphus lineatus, if a male seeking a mate encounters a female who already laid eggs, he will attack and try to destroy the eggs by throwing them out of her web. Of course, she will defend them and kill and eat him if she wins, but if he succeeds, she will surrender and mate with him.
  • For the jumping spider Evarcha culicivora, they vary in size and if the male is larger, he will tend to eat the female.
• Sharks. Males are smaller in most species.
• Snakes. For the same reason. Though there are exceptions. Snake dimorphism largely depends on whether the species engages in male ritual combat for mating (usually). If they do, the species will have larger males; if not, the females will be larger by default, presumably to accommodate a larger clutch of eggs. Pit vipers such as rattlesnakes typically have larger males, whereas pythons usually have much larger females.
• Female deep-sea anglerfish take this to the extreme, being voracious predators several times bigger than the tiny parasitic males.
• Eagles, or some other birds of prey.
  • The word for a male hawk or falcon, "tiercel", means "third". According to some sources, this is because they are roughly one-third smaller than females, though other sources claim it comes from the belief that only one in three eggs hatches into a male.
  • Some scientists postulate that male birds of prey are smaller because of an evolutionary trait; such things present in males first, and it may be that birds of prey are decreasing in size to make them more efficient hunters.
• Speaking of birds, the five largest bird species are all ratites. The two ostrich species are the biggest, and they don't fall under this trope because the males are bigger — but the next three species (the northern and southern cassowaries and the emu) all have bigger and more dominant females. Incidentally, female emus and cassowaries mate with multiple males, each of whom stays with a clutch of his mate's eggs and raises the ensuing chicks. Female cassowaries are significantly more aggressive.
• Spotted Hyenas; while the species as a whole is pretty tough (they've been seen hunting on broken legs, are capable of eating even the horns and bones of prey animals, etc.) the females are larger, more aggressive, and are dominant over males to the point that an adult male may have lower status than the alpha female's infant daughters. The females actually have an enlarged clitoris, which they use to urinate, mate, and even give birth through. Did we also mention that it closely resembles a penis? Yikes!
• Female mosquitoes are the only ones that drink blood. While this obviously makes them more of a pest than males, it also makes them very deadly as they are the ones that carry and pass diseases such as Malaria, West Nile, and Yellow Fever. Technically, this means they are one of the world's deadliest predators, while the males are entirely nectarivorous.
• Female Photuris fireflies mimic the light-flash patterns of other species's sexual displays to lure in males for lunch. Male Photuris are far more interested in mating than hunting.
• When militants came to Rukhsana Kauser's home to kidnap her, she was hidden so they started hitting people with their rifles. She took an axe from her hiding place under the bed and smashed the commander in the head, then grabbed his AK-47 and tossed another to her brother, and with the rest of the family drove them off and headed to the police station. She has since received lots of attention, several awards, several more attacks, and become a police officer.
• While male lions are pretty fierce and threatening, and larger and stronger than the females, from an animal's point of view (e.g. a zebra) they are actually less dangerous as male lions are used to having the females in the pride hunt for them (though this is something of a misnomer, as it's far from unusual for male lions to hunt, and indeed they are often relied on to overpower and kill especially large prey once the females have caught it).
• Many female leaders in history, such as Bloody Mary I of England, Hungarian Blood Countess Elizabeth Báthory, and the Iron Lady herself, Margaret Thatcher.
• Female wasps, bees, and ants are the only ones with the stingers. Males are actually short-lived in many species and physically constructed for the sole purpose of serving as breeding tools (more often the case for social rather than solitary species, and there are exceptions like the organ pipe mud dauber, a wasp where the males and females work together to build the nest, catch spiders, and guard the young; Dawson's bee males are short-lived but are very aggressive, have powerful jaws, catch and rape females, and might accidentally kill them); often, the male's genitals are derived from the structures as the female's stinger. After breeding season is done, the males (drones) are useless to the colony and may be driven out to die... if not killed on the spot and their corpses disposed of with the colony's other refuse. Assuming they don't die in the process, often in biologically horrendous ways — some species of bee have males that die from their gonads exploding.
• During the siege of the Hungarian castle and town of Eger (by the Ottomans) in 1552, the men did most of the hand-to-hand fighting, but it was the women who poured the cauldrons of boiling oil, tar, and any other nasty liquid they got their hands on. Demonstrated succinctly in a Hungarian musical made from one of the novels written about the siege, where the women of Eger get their own rocking song. The chorus translated goes something like this: "Fire, let there be burning fire, let [our liquids] boil and brew, and the attackers will pay because I'll chase them off to Hell! Fly on a black cloud, oh hot death, Hellfire awaits them [the attackers], let them run away from here, blood-soaked! No weak missus is she, put the wooden spoon and headscarf away, the brave women of Eger grab swords! We have to act, and not cry, up, to the bastion, to fight, kill the Turks, we have to win here, today!"
• At the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion), a communist terrorist group in Germany, a good half of the full members and around eighty percent of the supporters were women. The police quickly recommended that when they encounter the terrorists, shoot the women first because they are much more dangerous in combat. On the one hand, they would fight as brutally as possible in order to be respected by their male comrades-in-arms. On the other hand, as left-wing extremist terrorists, they have little inhibitions about shooting male police officers because they see non-left men as part of the patriarchy. This has become a well-known feature of female terrorists, so much so that an entire book (Shoot the Women First ) was published on the topic.
• Female praying mantises are at least a third taller than males. They are also more aggressive and vigorous. Male praying mantises fear that the females will eat them after mating.

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