Baba Yaga: Aging, Aggression, and Female Power

Today, women are bombarded with anti-aging messages, beauty standards, and pressure to look younger and younger. If we compare pictures of women from two to three decades ago, they looked older. Today, women have access to resources to take care of themselves, which is amazing. However, in the culture we live in, there is so much pressure on women not to look older.

The other day, I was talking to my Gestalt therapist mom friend, who is a bilingual therapist; we started talking about perimenopause, aging, and culture and creative projects. Soon, our conversations shifted to Russian fairy tales as cultural messages about motherhood and womanhood. We started talking particularly about Baba Yaga, who is powerful and wise. 

Today, I started thinking about what Baba Yaga can teach us about aging, womanhood, and how she responds to the standards society places on women.

Let's look at Baba Yaga. First, she is an old woman. Her appearance isn't well-kept, which is an understatement. Her nails look like claws, and she lost many of her teeth.  (Baba Yaga did not live in the age of Invisalign and implants). Her clothes are shabby. Her skin is visibly old. It's almost as if she represents the disowned part of women's beauty. And she has a “платок”-headscarf, but she puts it on her head, not in the traditional “babushka” way but in the hippie way; yeah, Baba Yaga would have done well in the 60s. 

What else? Well, Baba Yaga has her own real estate; she owns: “избушка на курьих ножках” -a hut on chicken legs.  Her property can move. She can command her property. What is interesting is that, despite being old and not attractive by societal standards, she has something important: wisdom. She is considered knowledgeable. She knows spells. She can do magic.

She can also be loud and whistle. She can eat people. Despite being visibly old, she is pretty energetic. Not only that, she has ступа и помело-a mortar and a broom. It’s almost as if we can see the opposite of aged women -power, energy, wisdom, aggression. 

Another interesting fact is that Baba Yaga lives alone. She has a cat but pretty much no humans. And not only that, she doesn't feel depressed about not being good enough for it; she doesn't see a man as a soulmate, and she is pretty self-sufficient.  People come to her to find her, not the other way around. In other words, Baba Yaga illustrates an anti-message to all beauty-product advertising: she is who she is. She accepts who she is, her body, her actions. She eats people, and she does not feel guilty about it. She expresses aggression, and she doesn't have the inner dialogue or spiral at bedtime about why she wasn't a “good girl” or what other people think. She is a badass! And she is not a people pleaser, which is so common for women. She does not filter what she says. She does not overthink what she does. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Baba Yaga’s wish to eat others can also be understood as a form of oral aggression. Instead of being the endlessly nurturing woman who feeds everyone else, she consumes. In that sense, she represents appetite, desire, and aggression that are usually disowned or controlled in women.

And she is also not a caretaker! She doesn't sacrifice herself to help a man or anyone else, which is an anti-message about how women are portrayed. She is not “kind” and “nice.” She is beautiful in her mess, her energy, and her enjoyment of life; she is mischievous and playful, and sometimes very tricky. 

Is Baba Yaga child-free? She is literally serious about eating them rather than caring for them. This reminds me of what British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott says: motherhood can be two things at once: love and hate. 

 It's almost as if Baba Yaga embodies the part of motherhood opposite the image of Madonna as a giver of sacrifice. She displays the disowned part of being a maternal figure- she asserts her needs and desires; she consumes rather than gives back. It’s almost as if she legalizes the disowned part of being a woman: aggression, assertiveness, being herself rather than trying to be who she is not. 

What can we take away from this image? I am not selling the idea of abandoning your appearance; rather, we can learn from her to be assertive, accept who we are, embrace expression of aggression, be self-sufficient, and not chase something that will make us feel good about ourselves.