Jude Ellison S. 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 show more 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.”

That pretty much sums it up.

Although Ms. Doyle sometimes repeats her points, this is a thought-provoking look at how the media and society treats women who dare to step out of line. She includes historical examples (Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte, former slave Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, Valerie Solanas, and Sylvia Plath, among others) of women who have refused to submit to the gender expectations of their time. She examines how women like Princess Diana and Whitney Houston, who have been mocked in life, are suddenly redeemed after their deaths. Her discussion of Miley Cyrus's refusal to be ashamed of her flaws actually made me respect Cyrus a bit, even if I still find her super annoying.

Definitely a worthwhile read! show less

A powerful and passionate look at the ways in which society likes to tear down women who buck the norms: women who are "too messy", "too emotional", "too crazy", or "too demanding" in public. Think Lindsay, Whitney, Britney—all of these women and more, Sady Doyle argues, are the pop culture version of the fallen woman. First they are held up as idols; then they are torn down. Doyle traces the evolution of the trainwreck archetype over a period of some two centuries, from Mary show more Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century to Miley Cyrus in the twenty-first, and argues persuasively that the trainwreck is held up as a totemic cultural figure, a cautionary tale to dissuade women from being ambitious or demanding attention. Even women of genius and talent—perhaps even especially such women—like Billie Holiday and Charlotte Brontë can be and have been framed in such a way.

Now, Doyle's case studies don't always work. She calls Harriet Jacobs—abolitionist, former slave, and author of the harrowing autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—a trainwreck, but this seems to awkwardly shoehorn the life of an unbowed badass into a mould that doesn't quite fit. I also don't agree with her framing of social and cultural mores in the West as trending consistently towards the left/progressivism in time. That's both a presentist view, and one that perhaps I'm perhaps too pessimistic right now to be able to enter into (oh 2017, you unremitting dumpster fire). Still, as a thought-provoking book—one that's written with vibrancy and a knowledge of when to deploy a well-timed F-bomb—this is well worth picking up.

(I listened to the audiobook version, which I thought was pretty well done but why do some audiobook readers seemingly refuse to invest the time in learning how to pronounce words in other languages? It doesn't take long and it would mean that I wouldn't have to cringe at "monsieur" becoming "mohn-syewer", or spend a long time figuring out that "TUHR-wine" was supposed to be "Théroigne.") show less

Best for: People who maybe enjoy the schadenfreud of the seeming downfall of famous women but who are also interested in maybe stopping that.

In a nutshell: Author Sady Doyle examines all the ways we push women and judge them for their imperfections.

Line that sticks with me: “We spend so much time pathologizing “overemotional” women that we scarcely ever ask what those women are emotional about.”

Why I chose it: I’m on a bit of a roll, reading about women who fight the system, who show more get taken down and fight back. This seemed to fit in nicely.

Review: I’ve laughed at Lindsay Lohan (and not just when she’s being weirdly supportive of Harvey Weinstein - when she’s getting pulled over and drugs are found on her). I’ve scoffed at Britney Spears before her very public meltdown, then did a 180 and for some reason only really saw her humanity when she was being put into conservatorship. I’ve prefaced statements of support for Hillary Clinton with “I know she isn’t perfect, but,” as though there is some politician who is.

I’m also a feminist, and I get real angry when women are dismissed as overly emotional, or irrational, or crazy. And while I sort of know how these two seemingly diametrically opposed philosophies can coexist in my mind, this book brought it to light.

Ms. Doyle provides a look not just at how we seemingly root for women to fail (but then laud them after they’ve died), but the history of how this has been going on for literally centuries. This isn’t an examination of Britney Spears (although her story features prominently in some chapters); it’s an examination of western society and how we treat women. Mostly, how we treat famous women, but Ms. Doyle uses that to point out that this translates to how we treat women in general. How we silence them, how we judge them, how we don’t allow them to be whole, complex people.

Parts are rough to read (although the writing itself is great), but nothing made me madder than the afterward that Ms. Doyle chose to include, discussing in about 20 pages the 2016 election outcome. She has a chapter where she discusses both Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinski, but this afterward looks specifically at Secretary Clinton in light of what we gave up, how we as a country decided we’d rather have an admitted sexual assaulting liar with no government experience than an extraordinarily qualified person who also is a woman. It hurts (and it’s why “What Happened” has been on my nightstand since it was released but I haven’t been able to open it), and it’s hard to find a lot of hope in it. But we’ll see, right? show less

Doyle has rewritten the Joanna Russ classic How To Suppress Women’s Writing for an age of celebrity. Though she covers Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Jacobs, Sylvia Plath, and a few others before recent decades, she’s really writing about how celebrity female trainwrecks are used by the people who comment on them to define the appropriate boundaries of womanhood. It was both enraging and invigorating to read during this election season, where the desire for Hillary Clinton to be a show more trainwreck, and her refusal, has been such an important theme. show less