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[dramatis]

Sady Doyle’s 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.

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 women—it was almost always women—who 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 scold’s bridle—an 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”).

It’s easy to shake our heads, today, at this relic of monstrous legalism. How awful things were back then! People were so barbaric! It’s 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 culture’s continued policing of women’s voices, figurative and literal: in every panicked discussion of vocal fry and up-speak, in every dismissal of Hillary Clinton’s feminine timbre as “scolding” and “shrill.” It stays with us, too, in the policing of women’s bodies, and clothing choices, and sexual practices. It’s with us every time a woman’s 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.

Of course, when a woman smiles too much, she's derided for "fake smiling".

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.”

Doyle’s nominal focus is, as the book’s 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 things—overly sexual, overly emotional, underly apologetic—that 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? That’s just one more chapter in an extremely old story. Everything was lovely, after all, until Eve got hungry.

“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 not—will not—believe in. It’s 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 ones—and which one will depend entirely on one’s perspective.

More at the link, which is sort of a book review. So there's more in the book, obviously.

 

[AlteredBeast]

Sounds like an indictment of popgaf...

 

[PeakPointMatrix]

Basically what 75% of criticisms of Hillary are composed of, or why people think she's "untrustworthy"

 

[Hasphat'sAnts]

I think the solution is for women to smile more.

That should work.

 

[Vimes]

I was following the author on twitter while she was being harassed by Bernie or Busters, so case in point I guess.