AILEEN

This post is one about inspiration, and I admit before you read further, that what I consider inspiring may not be what you consider inspiring.

I have recently been reading a book called Dear Dawn, and it is a collection of prison letters written by Aileen Wuronos, who was executed in 2002 after killing a number of men while working as a hitchhiking hooker. 

My admiration for Aileen started when I was 13, and my mother showed me the movie Monster, which was an idependent film that ended up getting Charlize Theron the Academy Award for best actress in a leading role. 

Contrary to what one might think upon me saying I admire Aileen, I do not admire what she did. I understand, as the foreward in Dear Dawn acknowledges, that to some radical feminists Aileen is a kind of outlawed Jesus -- the foreward describes her actions as what extreme feminists talk about, except she actually did it. For me, it is not like that. I admire Aileen’s unwillingness to give up on loving another person, despite what her life was like.

If you are interested in learning about her, watch Nick Broomfield’s 2002 documentary called Aileen: the life and death of a serial killer.

Image from Google

I can’t really explain what makes me feel so intensely when I watch movies about her or read her books, but I think it’s because I sympathize with her, on a smaller scale. She wanted to be loved, so she stopped at nothing to sustain that. She was failed by a number of systems, and she was looked down upon by society. 

As I noted previously, it was on a very small scale, but I feel as though some of the emotions she may have felt throughout times in her life, I have felt, too. In my early and middle years as a student I was told a number of times that parents of other students told their daughters to “stay away from me,” and I remember teachers who spoke to me in ways that, looking back on it now, were unfair and inappropriate. I feel I was failed by that system, and in the “society,” of elementary and middle school, I was looked down upon. In many cases I gave into peer pressure because I wanted my friends to love me, and I had a new boyfriend, another sexual experience, almost every other week. 

Aileen is an inspiration to my project because she represents resilience of the female spirit; to me she represents a naive and almost primitive way of looking at the world despite all the ugly things she saw in her life; she represents beauty hidden beaneath the dark and scary circumstances that have, in many cases, defined female adolesence, and she represents social change in the context of the documentary films Broomfield (a personal hero of mine) made about her.

p.s. I actually got to talk to Dawn, her best friend and the woman who all the letters are addressed to. I messaged her on Facebook in the summer and she told me some stuff about Aileen that I didn't know. It was cool.