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Sociology.
Women's Studies.
Nonfiction.
HTML:A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
??Smart, funny, and fearless.? ??THE BOSTON GLOBE Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. Maybe they are. And maybe that??s a good thing.... Sady Doyle, hailed as ??smart, funny and fearless? by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula??s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein??s ??domineering? mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, starving herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, dreaming her dead child back to life. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive. ??Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture; Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.???Andi Zeisler, author of&… (más)
Ho voluto leggere questo libro perché lo sentivo continuamente citare quando si parla di femminismo moderno. Diciamo che ho fatto molta fatica a non dargli fuoco prima di averlo finito. Ma un falò è effettivamente l'unica destinazione degna di questa accozzaglia di pregiudizi, vanità, disprezzo e cocenti bugie.
La autrice avrà le sue ragioni nell'odiare gli uomini, ma nello scrivere quanto scrive ricade negli stessi errori che critica. Condisce un disprezzo malcelato per gli uomini e una esaltazione della superiorità femminile, di sciocchezze e deliberate menzogne. Generalizza particolarità scelte apposta(si veda ad esempio la storia dei due omicidi o le innumerevoli citazioni prese dalla cronaca nera, raccontate sempre a metà e solo da una parte). Costruisce castelli immaginari sul neinte (leggetela l'odissea prima di citarla, ve ne prego. Altrimenti si resta convinti che le sirene ad Odisseo promettano sesso e piacere, come fa la autrice). E per favore, cresciamo, perché considerare un mediocre film di streghe per dodicenni come un capolavoro fondativo dell'essere umano e esempio di cinema illuminato. Sarei anche curioso di capire quale fosse la tesi e lo scopo complessivo del libro, perché se questo è un saggio, è un saggio senza argomento. Tant'è che il libro non finisce, semplicemente si tronca quando la autrice ha finito gli argomenti di lamentazione. Non c'è una chiusa, non c'è una conclusione, non c'è una proposta, solo livore. ( )
Nothing really new here for me, but those new to the genre will find it valuable. The 4th wave trope "transwomen are actual women" rather defeats the purpose of the analysis and isn't addressed here except in passing quips about how awful it is that a few men in dresses are portrayed negatively. Includes lists, by chapter, of literature, essays, tv shows, and movies on each topic addressed, which was the most useful section to me. I was made aware of this book by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab which created a series of perfume oils based on it (I recommend 'Woman at the Edge of the Woods,' a unisex scent that's woody, earthy, cool, and slightly malevolent). ( )
“We are that fire. We are the Apocalypse, the risen Furies, the scarlet woman riding her red dragon over the horizon, because we know that the woman and the dragon were always one and the same. Dead blondes and bad mothers, harlots and abominations, witches at the gate of light and darkness; we are the end of the world that was, and the first sign of the world to come, in the age after patriarchy, when monsters rule the earth. Our blood holds magic; our stories do, too. The violence we’ve survived can be our guide to what needs to change. The fire that burned the witches can be the fire that lights our way. Our power is waiting for us, out in forbidden spaces, beyond the world of men. Step forward and claim it. Step forward into the boundless and female dark.”
Okay, so I finished this weeks ago and loved it, but just could not bring myself to write a review (for no reason that has anything to do with this book). But here we are. Prepare yourself for run on sentences, which are my bread and butter. Doyle is an absolute force. From the horror film genre to witchcraft, the fetishization of serial killers to the gore of motherhood, Gothic literature to politics, beasts of mythology to centuries worth of pop culture figures, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers is stark, clever, and deliciously boiling over with abject feminine rage. My only regret is that I’m a horror movie wimp and won’t be able to stomach the majority of the films Doyle recommends. I also didn’t realize how much I identified with the T-Rex, specifically the one from Jurassic Park, until reading this book, which feels revelatory.
There is definitely an emphasis on the horror film genre and its depiction of women, so if this is not a concept that intrigues you, you may not connect with Dead Blondes as well as you could. However, Doyle dives deep into the patriarchy and its need to control women through violence, its fear of the immense power of women, and the presentation of women throughout history as inherently deviant. None of these ideas are what I would consider groundbreaking, but Doyle’s strength as a writer lies in her ability to rehumanize the monstrous feminine power through an embracement of our darkness and an affectionate interrogation of our love for all things nightmarish: slasher films, true crime, and all other stories throughout history where the female characters meet a violent end. Doyle uses an effective organizational strategy by dividing Dead Blondes into individual discussions of Daughters, Wives, and Mothers, and their representation in media, literature, and pop culture. And, when you reach the end of this book and are beginning to lament that there’s not more of it, Doyle bestows upon us the illustrious gift of PAGES UPON PAGES of recommendations that lent themselves to the writing of Dead Blondes, organized by the chapter they correspond to and the category of media. Do yourself a favor and read this now so you’re good and ready to burn everything to the ground once we’re allowed to leave our houses again. ( )
Feminist analysis of standard tropes—while not much was new, Doyle is an engaging writer and I didn’t know just how much people liked to blame Ed Gein’s mother for his serial killing. Also, when a woman wrote a book saying that maternal love wasn’t natural, but “uncertain, fragile and imperfect,” Bruno Bettelheim wrote a letter of protest to her editor because she shouldn’t have told the truth: “‘I am well familiar with the absence of any mothering instinct in many mothers,’ he wrote, but letting those mothers know they weren’t alone would ‘remove the feeling of guilt about rejecting their children which was the only thing that offered some protection for the child.’” ( )
...the chief delight of this book is not that it presents any new information, but that it aggregates a pile of information we already know into a package that is pleasing. It's pleasing because Doyle has an amusing voice. By 'has an amusing voice' I mean 'is possessed of a rage she has skillfully channeled into witty articulation' ... you'll feel less alone to hear our story told in this way. By 'you' I mean 'women'—and students of gender studies, and listeners of true-crime podcasts, and parents who sometimes feels guilty, and so on.
...the author explores women’s identities as daughters, wives, and mothers through a complex set of lenses—theoretical, historical, and cultural—and her prose moves seamlessly from feminist theory and pop culture analysis to damning real-life examples of the dangers women face because of the perceived threat of their sexuality.
Doyle recognizes how much of our misogynistic, transphobic cultural id is revealed in our trashiest cultural products, and she never loses sight of how the social norms they promote have led to feelings of fear and entrapment at best and countless deaths at worst. The author’s accounting of the death of Anneliese Michel, the inspiration for The Exorcist, is especially chilling. A lengthy appendix serves as both a casebook of her sources and a recommendation list for further research both high (Julia Kristeva) and low (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
If it were not for some power that wanted the feminine sex to exist, the birth of a woman would be an accident such as that of other monsters. —Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate
Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him…. I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For my daughter - may she be ferocious
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Driver: You girls watch out for those weirdos. Nancy: We are the weirdos, mister. -The Craft (1996)
Women have always been monsters.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Male and female children alike were supposedly traumatized for life by the knowledge that their mothers did not have penises, seeing the female body forever after as maimed and incomplete—a walking wound. Of course, when mothers do have penises, we are no less likely to judge them.
Men define humanity, and women, insofar as they are not men, are not human. Thus, women must necessarily be put under male control—and to the extent that we resist this control, we are monstrous.
Patriarchy was redolent of severe movement haircuts and problematic white women hollering about the Equal Rights Amendment. It was old-fashioned, unsexy. You could say I liked the word patriarchy because it took itself so seriously, which I, being young and cool, was forbidden to do.
Patriarchy is a cultural and moral hegemony that mandates one specific, supposedly “natural” family structure—a man using a woman to create and raise “his” children, with father exercising indisputable authority over mother and children alike—and on a grander scale, builds societies that look and function like patriarchal families, ruled by all-powerful male kings and presidents and CEOs and gods. I should say up top that there are other ways to drill down into oppression, other structures that coexist with patriarchy and help to maintain it: white supremacy, or capitalism, or heterosexism. You can dig into the foundations of the world from any number of angles, and you will always hit some or all of these other structures on your way down. But patriarchy rewards a specific focus. It is the big truth behind the countless smaller truths of sexism, the brutal foundation for all the violence that tears through women’s lives.
In Greek, apokálypsis means “uncovering,” the revealing of a hidden truth; it means finding something powerful and important buried underneath what we think we know.
The demon inhabiting Regan isn’t just something that happens to her during puberty. Her demon is puberty. At its core, The Exorcist is arguing that female sexual and reproductive maturity is sinful, and that God condemns little girls who grow up.
Puberty marks the point where girls stop being people and start being women, where it becomes important to ensure their submission to male power.
...slasher movies set forth a vision of the universe in which women and female bodies are continually in peril; where remorseless predators are everywhere, and female sexual desire experimentation, or trust is punished with violation, mutilation, and death; where only a few exceptionally lucky, paranoid, and resourceful women can go for long without being attacked, and even those women are emotionally traumatized by the nonstop violence they’re forced to witness. Not coincidentally, there’s another popular piece of media with the same worldview: the nightly news.
If tradition had taught him anything, it was that a woman who insisted too much on being treated like a person was probably not a person at all.
In the West, white men have told our stories, written our laws, made our definitions, dominated our arts and academies; when female experience has been accounted for at all, it has usually been a man doing the accounting. Women are defined from the outside, in terms of how they seem to men, rather than from the inside, as thinking, feeling subjects. They are not fellow people, not even a different or worse variety of person, but simply the opposite of men, and hence, the opposite of human.
The fear of female sexual liberation has always been partly a fear that women will develop desires that don’t include men.
Men must be free to sleep with women, and women must not be free to sleep with men. Or with other women, or with anyone, except for the one lucky fellow who’s purchased the right to impregnate her.
If you want to understand our sexual state of play, start with the fact that a man who kills half a hundred female sex workers is shown more mercy than a female sex worker who defends herself against seven men.
Laci would soon be one of the nation’s most famous cases of “missing white woman syndrome,” in which one white woman’s disappearance is covered as a national story while the kidnappings, assaults, and deaths of women of color go comparatively unreported.
But the point of the Byronic romance, I think, is not to excuse male violence, but to make a fetish out of female ambivalence, portraying masculinity as simultaneously attractive and scary and attractive because it is scary.
The question of how far to eroticize submission before it becomes mere degradation is at the center of Daphne du Maurier’s great twentieth-century Gothic novel Rebecca.
Maxim loves the second Mrs. de Winter after all; he’s just been feeling under the weather ever since he murdered his last wife.
...men who were reminded that “in a lot of American households, women make more money than men do” were substantially more likely to vote for Donald Trump and against his female opponent, Hillary Clinton.31 A 2018 study found that, in households where women do out-earn their male partners, those wives lie about how much money they make so as not to outshine their husbands. So do the husbands; while the women literally shrink their own accomplishments in conversation, their husbands exaggerate their incomes by around 2.9 percent.32
Sociologist Lisa Wade, summing up the research, says that married women are “less happy than single women and less happy than their husbands, they are less eager than men to marry, they’re more likely to file for divorce and, when they do, they are happier as divorcees than they were when married (the opposite is true for men) and they are more likely than men to prefer never to remarry.”33 Married women routinely rank at the bottom of happiness surveys, while married men are near the top.
it may be some consolation to know that pregnant women’s bodies are horrific precisely because they confront men with the brute fact of female reproductive agency. To witness pregnancy and birth is to catch an unfiltered glimpse of a woman with power over life and death—power that men cannot take away.
A pregnant woman is a woman who is finally, fully out of control. She is the face of horror.
It’s the rejection of that child, the drive to abandon or destroy a baby that does not perfectly reflect its father, that is the source of all the book’s suffering. Frankenstein is a story of patriarchy gone haywire. It is about the failure and breakdown of violence and science, tools and rules, when confronted with the brute power of procreation; the terror, which every mother must someday face, of creating a new person with no way of knowing what havoc you may have unleashed upon the world.
Conservatives defend “family” and fatherhood as if they’re under violent attack. That’s because, as long as women are self-determined and possessed of options, they are.
The fear here, despite generations of rhetoric to the contrary, is not about “killing babies”; men have always reserved the right to kill or at least abandon babies that displease them, usually after they leave the womb. The fear is that women will be the ones making the decisions; it is not death, but life, that we want to keep out of women’s hands.
Women are taught not just that mothers are not really people, but that when they become mothers, they will not want to be people anymore.
...we can see that mother work is oppressive because, the closer a woman gets to power, the less mother work she has to do, and the more ability she has to commandeer other women’s bodies and time. At the bottom of the ladder, the myth of Mama evaporates, leaving only work; birthing, raising, educating, and even loving children all become discrete jobs that one can do, and none of those jobs are seen as valuable or skilled enough to command a living wage.
Every killer you’ll ever read about is some mother’s son. And—as authorities never stop reminding us—every killer is some mother’s fault, too.
...the bad mother is patriarchy’s saving throw, its ultimate loophole: by moving the blame for male violence back one generation, it makes guilty parties out of the women who are its victims.
Blaming the mother is such an entrenched part of how we see male violence that allowing a murderer to define his victim doesn’t seem unethical if she’s also the woman who raised him. No matter what the evidence says, if the son who killed his mother says she had it coming, he’s the one we’ll believe.
White men with dangerous empathy deficits aren’t just spooky stories. They’re not outliers or aberrations. You can find dozens or hundreds of them by stumbling onto the wrong parts of Reddit. You can see them at alt-right rallies, faces twisted with hate behind tiki torches, or brigading women and people of color on social media. You can find these men in the White House, in the Supreme Court, in Congress, on CNN. We are swimming in it, drowning in it, all that masculine heartlessness; the patriarchal love of corrective, purifying violence is the basic currency of our political life, and the guiding ethos of our world.
For every good or true thing I try to teach my daughter, the world will tell her something different: that a boy hits you because he likes you, that girls who dress like that are asking for it, that it’s funny to send people death threats on the Internet, that we had to destroy the village in order to save it, that control and power always come from the top down and the outside in, at the end of a fist or a sword or a gun. What chance does any woman have, I wonder, of raising a purely good and kind and nonviolent child within such an inherently, gleefully violent world? What chance does she have, after a lifetime spent in that world, of being purely good and kind herself?
From the beginning, we’ve known that a woman who leaves society as we know it, who heads out to the dark and threatening spaces beyond the world we’ve built, will find not her death but her power.
...magic is the voice of the marginalized responding to their oppression.
So if we want to unravel patriarchy, to end the cycle of sexual and social violence that demonizes girls and maims them into bad mothers, the witch—the midwife, the administrator of birth control, the woman adept in the craft of controlled fertility and recreational desire—is the key disruptive figure in that story.
(Watching the chants take over the floor at the Republican National Convention, Rebecca Traister wrote, “I was not the only person in the room to be reminded of 17th-century witch trials, the blustering magistrate and rowdy crowd condemning a woman to death for her crimes.”)
The Trump administration represented a breaking point for many women. After decades in which sophisticated thinkers dismissed patriarchy as simplistic or irrelevant, it was revealed to be alive, well, and out for blood—the ethos which still ruled the US government and defined, or ended, countless women’s lives.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg Ebook, 2010. Emily Brontë’s ferocity breaks the Gothic apart and reconfigures it into something even weirder, giving us characters so wracked with emotion that they barely seem human (and Heathcliff, it’s worth noting, might not be). These characters don’t talk; they scream like maniacs and bash their heads into trees and torture puppies and die out of pure spite. Very romantic.
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Sociology.
Women's Studies.
Nonfiction.
HTML:A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
??Smart, funny, and fearless.? ??THE BOSTON GLOBE Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. Maybe they are. And maybe that??s a good thing.... Sady Doyle, hailed as ??smart, funny and fearless? by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula??s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein??s ??domineering? mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, starving herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, dreaming her dead child back to life. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive. ??Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture; Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.???Andi Zeisler, author of&
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Diciamo che ho fatto molta fatica a non dargli fuoco prima di averlo finito. Ma un falò è effettivamente l'unica destinazione degna di questa accozzaglia di pregiudizi, vanità, disprezzo e cocenti bugie.
La autrice avrà le sue ragioni nell'odiare gli uomini, ma nello scrivere quanto scrive ricade negli stessi errori che critica. Condisce un disprezzo malcelato per gli uomini e una esaltazione della superiorità femminile, di sciocchezze e deliberate menzogne.
Generalizza particolarità scelte apposta(si veda ad esempio la storia dei due omicidi o le innumerevoli citazioni prese dalla cronaca nera, raccontate sempre a metà e solo da una parte).
Costruisce castelli immaginari sul neinte (leggetela l'odissea prima di citarla, ve ne prego. Altrimenti si resta convinti che le sirene ad Odisseo promettano sesso e piacere, come fa la autrice).
E per favore, cresciamo, perché considerare un mediocre film di streghe per dodicenni come un capolavoro fondativo dell'essere umano e esempio di cinema illuminato.
Sarei anche curioso di capire quale fosse la tesi e lo scopo complessivo del libro, perché se questo è un saggio, è un saggio senza argomento. Tant'è che il libro non finisce, semplicemente si tronca quando la autrice ha finito gli argomenti di lamentazione. Non c'è una chiusa, non c'è una conclusione, non c'è una proposta, solo livore. (