Sady Doyle > Quotes

“We would rather see girls stopped dead—stuck in a constant childhood that never decays—than let them grow into women who can pursue their desires.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Even if you do convince yourself to speak, someone else has to agree to listen to you. If they deny you, silence comes back. And it will swallow you whole.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

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