Sady Doyles new book, Trainwreck, explores the many ways the U.S. (and its media, and its paparazzi, and its Donald Trump) continue to demean the ladyfolk.
Of course, when a woman smiles too much, she's derided for "fake smiling".In the early days of the United States, colonists imported from England a set of regulations that were ostensibly meant to maintain the public peace. They were called, collectively, common scold laws, and they targeted womenit was almost always womenwho had a habit of quarreling, too loudly, with their neighbors.
A woman who found herself on the wrong side of a scold law might be made to wear, as punishment, a scolds bridlean iron mask that fit over the head and depressed the tongue, to prevent her from further speech; more commonly, though, she would be dunked, ceremonially, into cold water (the better to cool her immoderate heat).
Its easy to shake our heads, today, at this relic of monstrous legalism. How awful things were back then! People were so barbaric! Its less easy to do that, though, when you consider how common the common scold mentality still is, even in our current age of relative enlightenment and egalitarianism. The Puritanical discomfort with the troublesome woman manifests, in miasmic form, in American cultures continued policing of womens voices, figurative and literal: in every panicked discussion of vocal fry and up-speak, in every dismissal of Hillary Clintons feminine timbre as scolding and shrill. It stays with us, too, in the policing of womens bodies, and clothing choices, and sexual practices. Its with us every time a womans behavior is dismissed as slutty, every time her emotions are dismissed as crazy, every time a guy suggests that she would be so much more pleasing if she smiled. It is with us every time the man who might become the next president of the United States refers to a woman as a pig, or a dog, or, when specificity fails, a disgusting animal. And every time his comments are met with feverish applause.
As the journalist Sady Doyle argues in her fantastic debut book, Trainwreck: A woman must be perfect, or not be anything at all, to encounter fame without being shamed or scarred.
Doyles nominal focus is, as the books title suggests, the trainwreck: the woman who has a public meltdown or a similar (and similarly public) fall from grace. Think Britney Spears. Or Whitney Houston. Or Miley Cyrus. Or Amy Winehouse, or Monica Lewinsky, or Princess Diana, or Judy Garland, or Billie Holiday, or Marilyn Monroe, or Sylvia Plath. Their falls vary, in their distance and their demeanor; what they share, though, is that they function as photo negatives of acceptable femininity. These celebrities downfalls announce all the thingsoverly sexual, overly emotional, underly apologeticthat the culture of the contemporary moment does not want its women to be. They serve as warnings, essentially, of the dangers of feminine assertion. Hillary, repeatedly punished for her ambition? Thats just one more chapter in an extremely old story. Everything was lovely, after all, until Eve got hungry.
More at the link, which is sort of a book review. So there's more in the book, obviously.Patriarchy, for all its blunt ubiquity as a term, still retains an element of magic: At once everywhere and nowhere, it describes not just a pervasive cultural infrastructure, but also something that many people simply do notwill notbelieve in. Its a myth of the angry feminists. A hobby-horse of the social justice warriors. A scapegoat. A lie. It deserves either widened eyes or rolled onesand which one will depend entirely on ones perspective.