Jude Ellison S. Doyle > Quotes

“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.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“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.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“The ultimate violence patriarchy does to women is to make us believe we deserve what has been done to us—a loop forever closing, breaking us so that we will raise broken women.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Female monstrosity inspires terror because it really can end the world—or our current version of it, anyway. But our world is not the only one, or the best one, and in fact, the more time I spend with monsters, the more I think its destruction is overdue.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“The only big weapon anyone has against you is that you’re human. Fucked-up, a bit. Imperfect, yes. In this, you are like every great human who has ever lived, male and female alike. If you’re slutty, well, Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty slutty. If you’re needy, my God, Charlotte Brontë’s needs could devour a person alive. If you’re mean, or self-destructive, or crazy, I assure you, Billie Holiday managed to record ‘Strange Fruit’ while being spectacularly self-destructive, and Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel while being both crazy and very, very mean. The world is still better with those works in it. Humanity is still lucky that those particular women existed, and that, despite their deep flaws and abudance of raw humanity, they stood up and said what they had to say.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“If you stay at home, get married right away, never get a job, never display any unwelcome emotions, and stay away from the public eye to such an extent that you actually never make any sort of impression whatsoever, you can’t become a trainwreck. You become a miserable, sheltered woman living in a prison of her own making, but hey: At least no one’s going to disapprove.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“What is wrong with being too much? With being too big? With being openly sexual, openly emotional -- with having "no calmness or content except when the needs of [your] individual nature were satisfied," as Martineau wrote of Wollstonecraft -- or even with being openly unhappy?

Only this: Insisting on the needs of your individual nature, being unquiet and unhappy when those needs are not satisfied, requires that you have an individual nature to begin with. And it requires that you not be ashamed of it.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Sexists refer to every female political opinion as "hysterical," just like they refer to every word a woman says when she opens her mouth as "shouting," and for the same reasons — not because the women are actually being loud or unreasonable, but because women are not supposed to have opinions or voices at all.”
― Sady Doyle

“Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they've done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women's bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it's only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you've told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Yet the diagnoses don’t end them, or even really define them. Instead, their struggles elevate them, make them special: We all understand that genius and madness are connected. At least, we do when the genius is male.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“It seems highly unlikely that any mother operating within patriarchy has not received sufficiently stressful messaging about her “duties.” But 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.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Faced with an existential threat, we cared more about hating the right woman than we cared about our own safety.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“We can find powerful and awe-inspiring visions of ourselves, hidden inside and underneath the stories patriarchy tells to shame us.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“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.”
― Sady Doyle , Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“These women, with all their loudness and messiness, their public loneliness and weepy outbursts, their falling down and falling apart, are the image of our own vulnerable selves, the wild and agonized messes we all conceal beneath our hopefully acceptable personas.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“And let’s be clear: The primary audience for celebrity blogs, tabloids, and reality TV shows is not straight men. Women are the ones who buy these stories. We’re the ones who enjoy them. We’re the ones these narratives are shaped for and aimed at. We’re the reason they exist. But what is it, exactly, that we’re enjoying?”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“So, we may wreck people simply to validate ourselves. We may wreck them because we’re jealous. We may wreck them because we fear the sight of public suffering, or because, well, everyone else hates them, so they must have done something to deserve it. Maybe. But then, there’s my favorite theory: Maybe we wreck people because they’re women.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“And that ending, of course, is another beginning. After we’ve buried the trainwreck, and forgiven her everything, we have to deal with the sad fact that she can’t entertain us any more. The death of the trainwreck, and the orgy of public compassion that follows, is also just a very loud, noisy process of denial and distraction that takes place while the media trains its sights on the next lucky girl.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“Once a woman is free to desire and pursue her own desires, she moves beyond the reach of our empathy; she's a threat that must be contained or destroyed.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“To forgive the dead, to immortalize the dead, is not forgiveness. It’s one more sign of how impossible forgiveness is”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“We can only do this by facing our demons; by acknowledging the presence of those rebellious, dangerous women under the surface, who cry out for some justice or some vengeance or at least some acknowledgement of all they’ve lost. We have to walk out into the woods and become familiar with the dark things that live there. But when we walk back into the daylight, we will know things others don’t know. We will be able to do things others can’t do. We can use our exclusion, our rage, and even our trauma as a way of seeing more deeply into the world.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“But if the Final Girl is an exception to the female rule, she can’t be our avatar. Most of us, by definition, are not exceptional. It’s when we shift out focus to the margins, and all the non-Final, ordinary, disposable girls who are stripped and splayed and stabbed and ripped apart, that the next part of our story becomes clear.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Consider this book, then, a feminist anatomy of the trainwreck. It's an effort to figure out who she is: why she's making us so angry; what, in general, she hath done to offend us. These are questions of more immediate and personal relevance than you may think: When women look hard enough at the trainwreck, we almost invariably end up looking at ourselves.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“It’s rare for the patriarchy to show its hand this clearly, but there you go; guilt, not joy, kept Mama in place. Women had to be confined to childbearing and child-rearing, but they also had to believe there was something wrong with them if they didn’t enjoy it.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own flaws and failings to be loved.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“our gruesome appetite to see women suffer, or to see them punished for violating our ideas of how women “ought” to behave—”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“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.”
― Sady Doyle

“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.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Affinché sia inattaccabile, il patriarcato deve essere rappresentato come necessario. Se gli uomini cominciassero a partorire o le donne a donare sperma, l'attuale stato delle cose apparirebbe per ciò che realmente è: artificiale e del tutto ingiusto. Il tentativo di separare biologia e identità ha rivelato su quali bugie si fonda il discorso patriarcale, e ha scoperto la sua vulnerabilità, per proteggere la quale ha fatto ciò che fa normalmente per contenere la possibilità d'azione delle donne cis: mettere a tacere con la violenza ogni manifestazione di vita fuori dalla norma.”
― Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers