In VISIONS OF SADISTIC WOMEN, 

Invested with both fear and longing, the figure of the sadistic woman is always double. At once castrating executor of the death-wish and object of desire, perverter of the ‘natural’ order and a necessary agent in the male sexual imagination, she embodies the ambiguous attitudes towards female sexuality that precipitated the crisis in modern conceptions of gender. (…) The sadistic woman violates both latent and overt gender stereotypes in the most radical manner, and thus presents an ideal case study for exploring the nature and function of these stereotypes. [via] [img]

Reasons from the literature for doing all this work.