There’s a photo that lives in my mind and I wish I could charge it an exorbitant amount of rent. You’ve seen the photo. A room of white men gathered in suits, seated behind microphones and flags, casting votes on legislation that governs the female body. Maybe it was Alabama. Or Texas. Or Florida. Or Mississippi. The location doesn’t matter, not really. What matters is the image itself: a chorus of authority devoid of the bodies it claims to speak for. A visual echo chamber of power performing one of its oldest refrains: Father Knows Best.

When I see that image, this homogenous assembly of men legislating women’s bodies, I think of the Sirens. Because this assembly reenacts the same mythic structure: the erasure of female presence, the silencing of female voices, and the continuous rebranding of female autonomy as dangerous.

Not just the Sirens from Homer’s Odyssey, though they are part of it. Not just the modern reimaginings either, like the Netflix series Sirens, which recently captivated me with its dark, slippery portrayal of three women accused of being monsters. I think of the whole lineage: the myth, the distortion, the silence that wraps around these figures like seaweed. It makes me wonder what it means that we keep recycling the same story across centuries of women labeled dangerous; not for what they do but for what their autonomy might mean to the men who fear it.

In The Odyssey, the Sirens sing songs that lure sailors to their deaths. That’s the version we’re told by Odysseus, the only man who ever claims to have heard them and survived. How convenient. He plugs his men’s ears with wax and ties himself to the mast so he can listen without risking ruin. He doesn’t try to translate their songs. He merely reports that they are lethal, then brags about surviving, and we take him at his word.

What if the Sirens weren’t seductresses but sentinels? What if their song wasn’t a temptation but a warning? What if the real danger wasn’t their sound but men’s refusal to listen unless they could control the terms of what they were hearing?

These questions overturn the myth’s foundation and sit at the heart of the new Netflix limited series, Sirens. The show follows three women: Simone, Mikayla, and Devin. Their lives are marked by death, sex, silence, and suspicion. None of them is ever confirmed to be a Siren, but all of them carry the same charge: too much, too quiet, too sexual, too unattached. They don’t confess or explain themselves. They don’t soothe and stroke the male ego. And in a culture still deeply uncomfortable with women who refuse to contort themselves to fit into the patriarchal boxes that structure our society, that’s enough to make them monstrous.

Simone walks away from a man who cannot survive her silence. Mikayla is blamed for another woman’s breakdown, though the man at the center of their triangle chose, lied, and fled. Devin is punished not for hurting anyone but for sleeping with men who decided they were owed more than sex. No one says “monster” aloud. They don’t have to. The camera says it for them. So does the music. So does the suspicion that pools around their every movement.

And this brings me back to that photo. What’s really on display in that room full of legislators isn’t just policy. It’s mythology. The oldest kind. The kind that chooses who gets what role long before anyone walks on stage. These men aren’t just writing law. They’re casting a play. One where women’s autonomy is inherently suspect; silence means guilt, desire is deviance, and female autonomy must be regulated for the safety of men.

It’s easy to imagine the Sirens in that room, if only in ghost form. Hovering at the edges, unseen, unheard, ever-present and not singing to the men but to each other. Not issuing a threat, but a call across time: We survived them. You must make them listen. 

Because the consequences of not listening extend far beyond metaphor. The silencing of women isn’t abstract, it’s lethal. Studies show that when women are excluded from policy decisions, entire populations suffer. Countries with fewer women in political leadership tend to have weaker healthcare systems, less education access, and higher poverty rates. When reproductive rights are curtailed, when the right to choose, to speak, to say no or yes to motherhood is taken away, maternal mortality increases. When women’s mental health is pathologized rather than supported, trauma metastasizes into silence, addiction, or disappearance. And it is in these spaces when women are crying out to be heard that women are seen as monsters. 

There’s a line between myth and institution. And for women, that line has always been permeable. In one of the most striking moments in Sirens, the three women end up in the same room, but they don’t speak. They don’t need to. Their stories, like their silence, ripple between them. They are not sisters, not exactly, but they are kin. Bound not by blood but by the way the world responds to them: with fascination, with fear, and with the overwhelming desire to possess or punish.

This is the true legacy of the Siren myth: not the song itself, but the way it is interpreted. The way women’s voices are rewritten by those who claim to have heard them. The way power clings not just to the act of naming but to the right to narrate. What we see in the legislative photo is not simply a manifestation of patriarchy; it is narrative control. It is Odysseus strapped to the mast, listening only to prove his power. It is every courtroom that asks what a woman was wearing. Every headline that calls a woman “troubled” instead of “wronged.” Every press conference, every policy summit, every town hall that calls itself representative while failing to represent half the population. Every global development report that speaks of “women’s issues” as sidebars to the main event rather than the backbone of civilization itself.

It is exhausting.

Sirens reminds us of is what the myth offers if we dare to read it differently: there is another way. The Sirens were never trying to be understood by men. That was never the point. They were singing for themselves. Maybe for each other. Maybe for the women still to come. Their power was never in the sound. It was in their refusal to translate their song for the sailors.

We live in a time of translation demands. Women are told to explain their pain, justify their decisions, and narrate their suffering in ways that can be heard without discomfort. Simone won’t. Mikayla can’t. Devin refuses. And we’re not sure whether to hate them or follow them.

That’s what makes the show Sirens so potent and so unsettling. It doesn’t give us answers. It doesn’t clear the women’s names or condemn them. It simply lets them be: complex, angry, lustful, quiet, sacred. It resists resolution in the same way the original Sirens resisted meaning. It refuses the comfort of knowing. There is a strange freedom in that. In refusing to resolve the story. In letting the song go untranslated.

So yes, I am bothered by that photo. Every version of it. Because it reminds me that the myth is alive and well. That we are still so willing to listen to and believe the sailor over the Siren, the lawmaker over the lived experience. That we’re still frightened of women who don’t ask for men’s permission.

But I am also comforted by the Sirens. Their solitude was not a punishment, it was a sanctuary. Their song wasn’t a weapon, it was a warning. Sisters! There is a boat on the horizon! Prepare for Danger!

And if men stopped tying themselves to the mast and started listening to understand that they are the danger, they might finally hear the truth: that the Sirens were singing for each other in sorrow; in warning.

A myth misunderstood, a show reimagined, and a room full of men passing abortion laws are reminders that women’s voices are too often filtered through male interpretation when they were never meant to be translated at all.