In 1996 Rapoport and collaborator Marie-José Sat created Brutal Myths, recognized as an important contribution to early feminist Web Art, i.e. in The Cyberfeminist Index (Mindy Seu, 2023).

Brutal Myths addresses the sadistic male fantasies about women found in the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a infamously misogynistic treatise on witch-hunting published in the 15th century. Because women were traditionally the lay healers of their societies and used herbs in their medicinal practices, Rapoport and Sat used representations of herbs as the primary metaphor of this work (this interest in herbal symbolism can be traced back to the computer printout drawing Geothe’s Urpflanz (1979)). Beginning with the Biblical story of Eve, Brutal Myths describes the “evil” herbs that contaminated the minds of men and made them believe in the dictums laid forth in the Malleus Maleficarum. Then the participant “plants” a “blissful” garden of “blessed” herbs to destroy prejudicial myths about women.

In 2009, Rapoport published Brutal Kicks: The Witch Hunt for Michael Jackson, appropriating Brutal Myths to look at the effects of child abuse on the life and career of the life of Michael Jackson.

For Sonya Rapoport’s retrospective exhibition, “Spaces of Life,” at Mills College Art Museum in 2012, Rapoport and Sat designed an interactive installation of Brutal Myths that included dried herbs, a bed, and stickers that viewers stuck to sheets of mylar.