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Sady Doyle Books

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“All of this is typical girl-fear. Once you realize that The Exorcist is, essentially, the story of a 12-year-old who starts cussing, masturbating, and disobeying her mother—in other words, going through puberty—it becomes apparent to the feminist-minded viewer why two adult men are called in to slap her around for much of the third act. People are convinced that something spooky is going on with girls; that, once they reach a certain age, they lose their adorable innocence and start tapping into something powerful and forbidden. Little girls are sugar and spice, but women are just plain scary. And the moment a girl becomes a woman is the moment you fear her most. Which explains why the culture keeps telling this story.”

GirlsPuberty
Author:Sady Doyle
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“Trainwrecks, as public figures, are necessarily also myths. But they’re the villains of the story; they’re our monsters and demons, images of what we fear, and who we fear becoming. I hated Britney early on, because I hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing; I wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied, and I wound up rejecting her. But every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject; the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent. In Britney’s case, she represented the end of youth, and the corruption of purity: She was the pretty, good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up, the “Queen of Teen” who was used- up and over-the-hill by age twenty-five. She was the Wages of Feminism, the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk. She was the cost of public life, for women.”

Feminism
Book:Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
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“Men fear women, even as they work to make women fear men, because, on the most basic level, male dominance is an illusion. For patriarchy to work, men have to control literally every facet of sex and family life– who has sex, with whom, and when and whether they get pregnant, who owns the child, and who care for it– and given the unruly nature of sex and birth, this control is perpetually slipping out of their grasp. Patriarchy is inherently unsustainable: It is not possible to control another human being at every moment of every day. It is not possible to control what (or who) women want. It is not possible to own a resource that is located inside someone else's body, which sex and reproduction always are. And if women realied how fragile male control is, everything might change. So, by constructing this patriarchy, men make monsters: the twisted, slimy, devouring, mutating, massively powerful images of female desire and sexuality and motherhood that take place outside of patriarchy. Monsters are the children that aren't supposed to exist, the feral desires we've fought to repress and forget, the outsiders waiting at the edge of our social world to confront us, the primeval, female body, that gives and takes life without permission. Men's dread of this power has given rise to countless, bluntly anatomical nightmares: corrupting uteruses poisonous blood, women who have slimy, serpentine tails instead of vaginas, or snakelike, elastic jaws that swallow men whole, or "castrated" women whose bodies are open wounds. A monster is a supposed-to-be-subjugated body that has become threatening and voracious– a woman who is, in the most basic sense, out of (men's) control.”

SexWomenPower
Book:Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers
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“Enforcing silence is easy. All you have to do is make it feel like the safest option. You can, for example, make speaking as unpleasant as possible, by creating an anonymous social media account to flood women with virulent personal criticism, sexual harassment, and threats. You can talk over women, or talk down to them, until they begin to doubt that they have anything worthwhile to say. You can encourage men's speech, and ignore women's, so that women will get the message that they are taking up too much room, and contributing too little value. You can nitpick a woman's actual voice—the way she writes, her grammar, her tone, her register, her accent—until she honestly believes she's bad at talking, and spends more time trying to sound 'better' than thinking about what she wants to say. And if a woman somehow makes it past all this, you can humiliate her anyway.”

Hillary Clinton
Book:Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
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“And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else: Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success had done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man's game before she showed up. Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj's press coverage, outside of the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt.”

SexismBlack Feminist
Book:Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why
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“Not only is the actual word "hysteria" gendered — it once referred to an exclusively female disease, a mental illness thought to be caused by a malfunctioning uterus — there is a very long history of critics using accusations or innuendo about women's mental health or emotional stability in order to shut down their political voices.”

PoliticsSexismMisogynyHysteriaSexistPolitics Of The United StatesHysterical FemaleHysterical WomenSexist LanguageHysterica
Author:Sady Doyle
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