Are women crueler than men in fascist systems?

I’m going to Theo Von this post. Von is the “manosphere” podcaster whose whole thing, much like cultural behemoth Joe Rogan, is to be an uninformed idiot. People love them for it and give them lots of money. They have an alarming degree of influence. Kamala Harris was slagged for refusing to go on Rogan. JD Vance recently appeared on Von’s show in order to lie a bunch for a course correction on the genocide in Gaza after Von, who’s otherwise reliably MAGA, cried about dead Palestinian kids in a previous episode.

Anyway! My point is that I don’t know the answer to this question: why is it in fascist systems women seem crueler than men? Are they actually crueler than men? Or do we notice it more because they are women and we don’t expect them to have the stomach for violent cruelty?

Everyone in Trump’s orbit is evil of course, but only Kristi Noem posed in front of gulag prisoners with shaved heads. It seems that some of the most horrifying genocide-language comes from Israeli women soldiers: I wish I could unwatch videos of random Israeli girls bragging about killing Palestinians. “People in Gaza need to die. I killed two Palestinians, And I am happy about,” says this grinning psychopath. In footage from 2007 a female soldiers says she used to think about killing a Palestinian child and adds “but now I just laugh about it.”

Another. “When we see someone from far away we bomb them. Beautiful. Blood everywhere,” says a beautiful young woman lounging on the beach.

“Rape was mainly done by Israeli female officers inserting objects into the genitals of detainees,” Kifeya Khraim from the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC) testified in March.

Recall Lynndie England photographing herself proudly torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

So are women crueler in systems that reward cruelty? A friend worked for Andrew Cuomo and was traumatized by the mean girl culture of the office—her female superiors were abusive sadists (vote Zohran!) If so why?

Or do we notice it more and frame it differently?

I don’t know! Ideas welcome in the comments. Below is the story of “Julia the Beautiful” a gulag guard in 1940s Communist Bulgaria (also file under “One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This).

“Julia the Beautiful”

Julia was one of the first prison guards hired in Belene (a gulag built on a remote island, Persin, on the Danube) to oversee the female inmates. She got the job two months after her 20th birthday. Born to an impoverished, widowed mother in Belene village, the job paid far more than anything else she could get. She was issued a crisp, navy-blue uniform.

Julia got her nickname because she was “strikingly cruel and pretty,” in camp survivors’ accounts, writes the historian Lilia Topouzova.

A photo of her from the time shows her in her uniform, proudly hoisting a rifle, curly hair in a cloud around her head, clad in the uniform she adored. Julia was a good markswoman.

In the early-1990s, Julia was accused of administering cruel beatings and tortures. In testimonies during her trial a witness recalled seeing her beat a woman to death.

“Julia was beating (Dina Pitsina) to death with a club. After she finished beating her, she mutilated the dead body by jumping on top of it, and she shoved the club in her eyes, then down below, she kept on jumping on top of her . . . she disemboweled her.”

She was also accused of setting a woman’s hair on fire and sticking snakes in women’s mouths.

In 1992, the new Bulgarian government launched an investigation of abuses in the camps that culminated in a public trial of the former vice minister, a camp supervisor, and three former guards, including Julia. Although she was the lowest ranking official it was Julia that transfixed the public and inspired breathless newspaper accounts.

She was charged with“the premeditated killings [committed alone and in conspiracy with another.”] She spent years in jail while the trial was ongoing.

In her testimony to the court, Julia had admitted to beating the women. But that was the nature of the job, she said.

“When the inmates did not carry out their quotas, I beat them with a stick,” she said. “I beat them with a stick, but not a big one.” Julia added that she was just following orders.

“These were my orders from [camp commander] Gogov and [his deputy] Goranov. Both told me that [vice minister of the interior] Mircho Spasov’s instructions indicated that these women were the dregs of society and were sent here for heavy labor.”

“Mircho Spasov I have seen once. . . Gogov used to curse at the camp inmates very vulgarly and cynically. He gave me orders to beat them, saying that it had been Gogov who ordered it and that these are [sic] the instructions of Mircho Spasov.” She claimed she didn’t have a choice.

“There was no way that I could not execute these orders. According to Gogov and Goranov, Mircho Spasov used to say that if someone left the camp “his road should be narrow”—da mu e tesen putiat.”

“These words of Mircho Spasov, or rather the instructions given to me by Gogov and Goranov, I understood to mean: after they have passed through the camp, they should no longer be whole people [te veche da ne sa pulnotsenni kato hora]. This we had to achieve through the hard labor that we assigned them to, and beatings, if they didn’t fulfill it [the hard labor quotas].”

Julia insisted that she’d never murdered anyone. “I have not killed anyone. How could I kill and sleep peacefully?” she told the court.

“I don’t remember dead women during my shifts. I am telling you that I hardly beat them. Everyone hits occasionally. . . But I have never killed,” she said. “I have never killed and I will never kill. This is something horrible, isn’t it?”

By the mid-aughts Julia was a shut in. Although she was not found guilty of her crimes—the statute of limitations had long expired—she’d come to symbolize the cruelty of the camps.

The historian Topouzova showed up at her apartment and her wary daughter agreed to let her in to speak to her mother. To prepare for the interview, Topouzova spoke with journalists who had covered Julia’s trial. “According to what they told me, and to the discourses they had participated in creating, Ruzhgeva chose to become a camp guard to fulfill her sadistic desires. Her deviant, almost erotic, femininity, prosecutors, journalists and filmmakers decreed, had enabled her to kill.”

Topouzova found an old lady, shaking from Parkinson’s. Julia told the historian that the salary—and the crisp, navy blue uniform—had been too good to pass up. “I really liked my uniform; I had never had such nice clothes before,” she told Topouzova.

“This is what gave me the greatest suffering but also the greatest happiness,” she said.

She boasted that she shot better than most men did. Her high salary meant that she didn’t have to get married to survive and have a family. She had a daughter out of wedlock and didn’t have to deal with a man to take care of them. Topouzova noted that in Julia’s photo album, a picture of her shooting a gun in her uniform is juxtaposed next to a photo of her daughter as a young child standing in a playground. Julia did not seem aware of the contradiction between her role as labor camp guard and doting mother—even though many of her wards had also had small children. Despite her denials, witness testimony suggests that she did in fact kill women.

“Ruzhgeva’s story gives us pause, as many accounts of ordinary individuals committing acts of murder often do,” Topouzova wrote. “No evidence suggests that Ruzhgeva carried out her responsibilities as a guard because of an ideological commitment to communism. She was not even a member of the Communist Party.”