Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power

by Sady Doyle Narrated by Chloe Cannon

Overview

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 listeners 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Smart, funny, and fearless.”
—The Boston Globe

“This book is brilliant as it is frightening. A must read for all fans of horror.”
—Tor.com

“Gifted with humor and insight, Doyle writes as if she’s ready to lead a revolution for women who are tired of being underestimated and mistreated by the men who fear them.”
—Bust Magazine

“A triumphant book, one worthy of sitting on the shelf next to—and informing—the many empowering books championing women this year.”
—The Rumpus

“A deep dive into misogyny in popular culture . . . Unflinching, hard-charging feminist criticism."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Cutting and composed . . . a study of the ways women throughout history have been depicted as monsters in order to cement their roles in a patriarchal society . . . (A) superinformed, no-nonsense, and even sometimes funny take on female monstrosity.”
—Booklist

“Sady Doyle is an absolutely essential voice in this moment of moral panic. As we continue the battle for gender equality, her writing grounds the fight in a refreshing dose of sanity. I recommend it to anyone interested in remaining sane.”
—Lauren Duca, author of How to Start a Revolution: Young People and the Future of American Politics 

“Sady Doyle has created a chimera of a book: simultaneously a crackling great read full of riveting stories, and a damning indictment of how our culture represses what it can't control. It's hard to read, at times, but also necessary and validating, swashbuckling without being careless, powerful and funny and compelling throughout.”
—Emily Gould, author of And the Heart Says Whatever

“Sady Doyle’s provocative and incisive cultural commentary is consistently several steps ahead of mainstream political analysis. What, today, is more important that an examination of our society’s fear of women and power, a topic Doyle has studied down years. Her deep understanding and witty, engaging analysis will make you see the world in a whole new, and important, way.”
—Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

“Thoughtful and compelling, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers is alternately refreshing and comforting, fascinating and infuriating. Doyle shines a light into dark corners where feminine rage and violence lurk . . .”
—Cherie Priest, award-winning author of The Family Plot
 
“From history to pop-culture, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers lays bare the violence and structured misogyny we don’t want to see. She has ripped the blinders off.”
—Nancy Schwartzman, director of Roll Red Roll and Founder of Circle of 6
 
“Sady Doyle has redrawn the lines in the cultural sand with Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. Combining history, folklore, true crime, personal anecdotes and horror films Doyle has written a book that redefines the female experience, emboldening, empowering and expanding it beyond its preconceived confines. Beautifully written, devastatingly funny, and exhaustively researched Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers is a deeply necessary and urgent book.”
—Alexandra West, author of The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula
 
“An eye-opening treatment of an issue that could not be more timely: the pathologization and demonization of women's power.”
—Kate Manne, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“Sady Doyle opens my eyes, and challenges my beliefs, with a combination of historical perspective, fascinating portraits, psychological insight, and just damn good writing.”
—Andrew Jenks, host of What Really Happened?
 
“Doyle delivers a defense and embrace of the feminine grotesque.”
—Erika M. Anderson (EMA), musician and multimedia artist

“Why are powerful women so scary to us, and what myths keep them that way? A macabre, witty, and often bone-chilling look at the way patriarchy has contained and neutralized women's power throughout the ages by construing it as monstrous, Doyle pulls off her dazzling synthesis in page-turning prose that makes it clear what the real monster is—patriarchy—and leaves us with the hope that by embracing the monstrous within ourselves, we might just slay it.”
—Amy Gentry, author of Good as Gone and Last Woman Standing
 
“Sady Doyle successfully reframes patriarchy itself. It is not, as we have been told, the natural order of things: where men are fated to lead, absent any consideration to women. Instead, it is a system that was unnaturally constructed in fear of women. And now, as we reach what feels to be the end, the imagined monsters we have always made of women must become the very real monsters that are the only beings capable of breaking the system entirely.”
—Zack Akers, creator of Limetown podcast and TV series
 
“This book blew me away. Step by inexorable, logical, sure-footed step, Sady Doyle lays bare how patriarchy traps us in the stories it tells about us, and how these stories are a form of violence in themselves. Fueled by rage and spiked, like a nail bomb, with humor, this book feels like the lights coming on suddenly, just in time to see the roaches scatter.”
—Carina Chocano, bestselling author of You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks and Other Man-Made Women
 
“Wrested from the sanitized grasp of corporate jargon and cliches, Doyle acquaints readers uneasily with the brutal, corporeal roots of our language and rituals around power: corrupt, degrade, gag, discipline, condemn, expel . . .”
—Alana Massey, author of All The Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen To Be Famous Strangers  

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile

Audiobook listeners will find lots to chew on in this compelling examination of the myths and belief systems that uphold patriarchy. Chloe Cannon’s cadenced narration lends Doyle’s work the gravitas it deserves. From nineteenth-century gothic novels and ancient Irish folklore to classic slasher movies and contemporary true-crime stories, Doyle explores how the myth of female monstrosity—and the fear of female power—functions in history and pop culture. Cannon's voice is full of emotion when the narrative veers into the personal but remains steady and objective during the more research-heavy sections. She especially excels at the lengthy quotes that appear throughout the audiobook, altering her delivery just enough to ensure that they add depth and clarity to Doyle’s arguments. L.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-06-17
A deep dive into misogyny in popular culture, from timeless myth to contemporary horror flicks.

The second book by feminist commentator Doyle (Trainwreck: The Women We Love To Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why, 2016) is wide-ranging but operates from a simple premise: Western culture tends to perceive women as unruly monsters who can't be trusted as girls, wives, or mothers. In exorcisms—and, by extension, the horror classic The Exorcist—Doyle observes a cultural urge to barricade girls from puberty and sexual independence. She draws a throughline from Celtic myth to Romantic poets to true-crime touchstones like the Laci Peterson case, showing how each represents a fear of women and urge to bring them to heel. In the case of serial killer Ed Gein (the inspiration for a host of horror tales, Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs most famously), Doyle notes how the blame for his actions often shifts to his mother, routinely portrayed as "fanatically religious, permanently enraged, a castrating, sexless, son-warping harpy." The author sometimes approaches her source material, particularly movies, with wit and humor: She revels in rooting for the momma T. Rex in Jurassic Park and roasts Ben Kingsley's turn in the terrible sci-fi film Species, as he "visibly chokes down every line of dialogue with a barely contained rage that says ‘I played Gandhi, damn it.' " But 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).

Unflinching, hard-charging feminist criticism.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172951732
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Women have always been monsters.

Female monstrosity is threaded throughout every myth you’ve heard, and some you haven’t: carnivorous mermaids, Furies tearing men apart with razor-sharp claws, leanan sídhe enchanting mortal men and draining the souls from their bodies. They are lethally beautiful or unbearably ugly, sickly sweet and treacherous or filled with animal rage, but they always speak to the qualities men find most threatening in women: beauty, intelligence, anger, ambition. In Christian myth, even the apocalypse is female. The book of Revelations prophesies that the end times will be ruled by a lustful queen, who carries a golden chalice “full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” She appears drunk on the blood of saints, covered in jewels, and riding a scarlet beast with seven heads: “And upon her forehead was a name written, mystery, babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.”

Women have always been monsters, too, in the minds of great men; in philosophy, medicine, and psychology, the inherent freakishness of women has always been a baseline assumption. Aristotle famously concluded that every woman was a “mutilated male.” Thomas Aquinas said that, were it not for their ability to bear sons, God would have been wrong to make women at all: “Nothing misbegotten or defective should have been in the first production of things.” Menstrual blood emitted lethal miasma; a man who had sex with a woman on her period would waste away and die. Female sexuality was insatiable; if given free reign, women would seduce the Devil himself, and use their resulting satanic powers to enslave mortal men. Even in utero, the female body was vampiric. You could tell that a woman was having a daughter if she became uglier over the course of the pregnancy. A girl always stole her mother’s beauty.

This fear is not a thing of the past. The killer period sex is from ancient Rome, the witches are medieval, but the  mother-deforming female fetus is something people still believe in today; you’ll find it written up on parenting websites, with explanations about hormones. The medical establishment still regards female bodies as a freakish deviation from the norm; one 2018 study found that 53 percent of female heart attack patients had been told by doctors that their symptoms were “not health-related.” Women and men usually have different cardiac symptoms, and the doctors could only diagnose male hearts. Centuries after Aristotle, Sigmund Freud updated and expanded the “mutilated male” theory by arguing that women were “castrated.” 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.

The basic premise of sexism is that, to paraphrase the noted medieval theologians Radiohead, men have the perfect bodies and the perfect souls. (Well, cisgender white men without disabilities who have never had sex with other men, anyway—once you propose a biological elite, the definitions tend to keep getting more and more elitist.) 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.

But a monster is not something to dismiss or look down on. A monster does not merely inspire anger or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear. Beneath all the contempt men have poured on women through the ages, all the condemnations of our Otherness, there is an unwitting acknowledgment of our power—a power great enough, in their own estimation, to end the world.

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