You’re in the woods, cut off from civilization. Your friends are dead. You haven’t eaten in days. You’re faced with a choice: eat the girl you grew up with, or die. 

     When the plane carrying the Yellowjackets varsity girls soccer team crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness, the girls are left with no means of survival, no source of food, and no way of getting back home. This is the plot of Showtime’s 2022 TV show, Yellowjackets, which is currently releasing its 3rd season.

     As the weather begins to turn, so does the girls’ sanity. After watching a high school soccer team descend into madness and resort to cannibalism, it’s only natural to be left with troubling thoughts. Could this even happen? Was it madness or desperation that finally got to the girls?

    Senior Hayden Weaver said, “No shot a group of teenage girls could actually do that, though.” Why not?

   Young girls have always been underestimated. They’re the ones forced to morph into the mold society made for them. The ones told they’re too sensitive and will never achieve greatness.

     So when the Yellowjackets slowly lose all sense of self and descend into madness, it may be unsettling, but audiences feed off of it. The gore, the blood, the disturbance of it all — they’re breaking the mold. Mixing those ingredients and adding the unique spice of a teenage girl — instead of its usual salt and pepper —  creates the perfect recipe for a feminist tale.

     From the very first episode, the girls are shown sitting around a fire in the woods wearing masks of different animals. They appear to be led by one girl in particular wearing a crown made of antlers: the Antler Queen.

     Yellowjackets continuously lays Easter eggs as the girls appear with objects placed purposefully behind their heads, making it look like they have antlers, which represent beauty, strength, and wisdom.

     Deer shed their antlers each year. They use their antlers for both sexual attraction and as weapons. It’s a common stereotype for women to use their sexuality as a weapon. In the woods, the girls have no need to be sexy, only to survive. The use of antlers as the crown of the Yellowjackets’ leader shows that the girls’ values exist outside of what society expects of them.

     Left with no sense of morality, looking for anything to tell them where to go, the teens find themselves haunted by what they call ‘The Wilderness.’ It becomes a kind of deity, something that controls the girls and turns them into something no one would expect.

     In a life-or-death situation, your mind is no longer your own. When your conscience switches to fight-or-flight mode, perhaps anyone could be desperate enough to eat their friends or start a cult in the woods.

     Starved, isolated, and freezing, the instinct that overpowers all else is the human need to survive. Heartbeats quicken.

     Boom.

     Boom.

     Boom.

Vision narrows, hearing sensitizes, and the body prepares to fight or to run. In that situation, who knows what a teenage girl might do?

    Yellowjackets is about more than just cannibalism. It’s about women standing up and fighting back against the people who try to control them. It’s about girls being set free when they escape the impenetrable chains society has placed on them. It’s about the ferocity of women when backed into a corner—not unlike the attacks being launched on women today.