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

[ash-and-starlight]

Books of 2023

the list nobody asked for <3

My reading habits had gone a bit stagnant in the past couple of years so this year i made the effort to engage in reading again and wow books really are good!! who would have thought! Sharing this year's book log with the small reviews i did while reading yeah i am That kind of list lover if u feel like being nosy, (and maybe even help mi crowdsource reading recs based on my likes 👀🤲?)

The left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin Ursula i Need to know your thoughts on omegaver- [gunshot] THAT ASIDE yeah. mrs Le Guin you've done it again. I can see why everyone got their brain chemistry altered by this book.

The Membranes - Chi Ta-Wei another brain chemistry altering book. would love to discuss it with a gender studies major lmao

Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie its a v atmospheric and poignant story, I know I would have loved it more if I was familiar with the rich religious/cultural background it draws from

The Masquerade Series - Seth Dickinson Crazy insane in the membrane about this series. one of the most compelling worldbuildings I've ever seen, and most importantly it features one of the most crazy wet pathetic scrunkly meow meow protagonists i've ever had the pleasure of reading about.

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides i liked the writing style of this book a lot! idk how well it holds up re: intersexuality topic, but its a very engaging read.

Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power - Jude Ellison, Sady Doyle The title says it all honestly, its a beautiful, thought provoking and engaging essay, spanning eras, pop culture phenomenons, and real life events on the topic of women and horror.

The cat who saved books - Sōsuke Natsukawa this was so cute and heartfelt, it will really make you go Ah Yes, this is Why we Love Books <333

The Locked Tomb Series - Tamsyn Muir now when people say there is a girl who is the cursed sacrifice of 2000 infants who falls in love with the sleeping embodiment of the soul of the Earth (barbie) and also another girl who is the only survivor of the aforementioned sacrifice and is. a Jesus metaphor? and also the two girls become one at some point. and every book is a different genre. and god is bisexual. and memes survived the nuclear apocalypse. I can just nod and say so true.

The Area X Trilogy - Jeff VanderMeer Rotating this series in the microwave of my mind at the speed of light it's soSO GOOD!! the movie doesn't even come close honestly u NEED to read the books. and then go touch grass and be aware of every strand in a completely new way.

The Dawn of Yangchen - F. C. Yee nice read! I was more invested in the worldbuilding crumbs than in the actual story lmao, I will forever think about the HEATED airball rivalry between the air temples and about the swt greetings / bethrotal armbands.

Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex - Bernard Saladin d'Anglure starting w a disclaimer bc I feel like the topic of native colonization was ignored when it should have been way more prominent when talking about the context of where and when these testimonies were collected?? That aside it was very interesting and well put together, with first account testimonies of Inuit elders about their myths, lifestyles and beliefs.

Pachinko - Min Jin Lee i read the book after having seen the tv series (which i also rlly recommend). Very moving story about a family and its generations, from Korea under Japanese colonization to modern day America.

Her body and other parties - Carmen Maria Marchado sometimes I go about my day then I remember this book exists and stare at the wall for 30 minutes.

Dictionnaire de l'impossible - Didier Van Cauwelaert big miss. this collection of articles about "strange impossible phenomenons" sounded so quirky and interesting but i sure would have loved if the author hadnt so clearly picked a side. and also way too much church for my tastes.

He who Drowned the World - Shelley Parker Chan Im not even gonna speak about this one if you've followed me since july you know what pits of insanity and despair i'm in

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin Sometimes!! the book with pretty covers put in the "famous on socials" bookstore section!! are good!! It's about being othered it's about connection it's about diaspora it's about love and friendship and most of all it's about viddy games.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel reading this post-covid and learning it was written in 2017 was A TRIP. Psychic damage at every page. still feeling very normla.

The Mask of Apollo - Mary Renault Ugh i desperately wanted to like this book because the setup is so interesting and full of potential, but the end result was just. flat. flat story flat characters the plot focusing on the wrong things at the wrong times i was so DONE when i reached the end otz.

Babel - R. F. Kuang LOVED the worldbuilding in this, the "lost in translation" system of magic is one of the most interesting things ive ever read. I think theres something about the writing in general that didn't win me over completely?? but all in all a very good

Red Ocean - Han Song This sure is a Book. That i've Read. its so profundly strange and unlike anything ive come across that i dont even know what to feel about it. i think 90% of my confusion comes from Not Getting Cultural References so if someone has a "red ocean explained" essay plz send it my way bc i couldnt find one.

[julictcapulet]

re. your post about nonfiction, do you have any nonfiction books that you would recommend to people who haven't read any ever?

these are some of the ones i've read that i either loved or just ones that i think offer a bit to the conversation. if anyone has more recs for me, please send some <3

know my name, chanel miller (10/10)

crying in h mart, michelle zauner

i'm glad my mom died, jennette mccurdy

everything i know about love, dolly alderton

trainwreck: the women we love to hate, mock, and fear...and why, sady doyle

dead blondes and bad mothers: monstrosity, patriarchy, and the fear of female power, sady doyle

trick mirror: reflections on self-delusion, jia tolentino (there are people who hate this one, and then there are communications students. i'm a communications student)

bad feminist: essays, roxane gay (really great introductory book to nonfiction/feminist theory)

all about love: new visions, bell hooks

call them by their true names: american crises, rebecca solnit

empireland: how imperialism has shaped modern britain, sathnam sanghera (a little tedious for me, but an important read nevertheless)

the madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination, sandra m. gilbert & susan gubar

mediocre: the dangerous legacy of white male power, ijeoma oluo (READ THIS!!!!)

men who hate women: from incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all, laura bates

a curious history of sex, kate lister (served absolute cunt)

[explorenocta]

Research Archive

Visual

The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror

Dead Letter: The Aesthetics of Horror

The Aesthetics and Psychology Behind Horror Films

How color, time, space and sound elicit fear in an audience

Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture

History & Analysis

The horror genre : from Beelzebub to Blair Witch

Monsters from the Id : the rise of horror in fiction and film

Knowing fear : science, knowledge and the development of the horror genre

Dead blondes and bad mothers : monstrosity, patriarchy, and the fear of female power

Haunting experiences : ghosts in contemporary folklore

Horror as pleasure : the aesthetics of horror fiction

Unutterable horror : a history of supernatural fiction

Haunted : on ghosts, witches, vampires, zombies, and other monsters of the natural and supernatural worlds

Horror fiction: the unexpectedly ancient origins of ghost stories

Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear

Lore

The United States of Cryptids

The Forest in Folklore and Mythology

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Treasury of Folklore: Woodlands & Forests

Treasury of Folklore: Seas & Rivers

Breverton’s Phantasmagoria

[onebluebookworm]

Women's History Month 2023 - March 24

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

[snowman-aesthetic]

In the days leading up to her death, Michael’s neighbours recalled hearing screaming coming from his house - “take It, you [bitch], you old faggot, or we will burn you” was one widely reported comment - and seeing Bridget tied to the bed, where she was doused and force-fed potions to repel fairy magic. Sometimes that meant herbs boiled in milk. Sometimes it meant urine. Fairies hated iron, so she was threatened and prodded with a hot poker; fairies hated Christianity, so a priest was called. Bridget was made to recite her name and her male relatives’ names; she had to describe herself as “Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God” over and over, as if the spell could be broken by reaffirming the proper marital relation. When she was slow to answer, they held her over the kitchen fire. 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When she refused a third piece [of toast], Michael knocked Bridget to the ground and began forcing the bread down her throat. He began demanding that she call herself “the wife of Michael Cleary” again .... Michael then stripped his wife’s clothes off, except her chemise, and got a lighting stick out of the fire. She was lying on the floor and he held it near her mouth. 

Fairies hated fire. So Michael held fire to his wife’s mouth, telling her to take back what she’d said. Some of the witnesses remembered her crying out for Johanna - “oh, Han, Han” - and Johanna remembered Bridget saying, “give me a chance,” but then her head hit the floor, hard, and she stopped talking. So it may have been the blow to the head that killed her. We can’t know. Somehow, in the struggle, a spark got loose, and Bridget’s chemise caught fire. Over the screaming of her assembled family, Michael reached for a lamp and poured the burning oil over Bridget’s body, stoking the flames.

-/-/-/-//-/-/-/-/--/

...given what we know about the other men, the obvious pride Bridget took in herself, and the financial power she wielded - say it plainly, the fact that Bridget was not under her husband’s control - it may have been a lie, and a way to justify killing her. Men kill women every day to assert their authority. Bridget wouldn’t have been the first. 

-o-o-o-o-o-o-oo

“Fairy wives” behaved less like inexplicable creatures of the spirit world and more like women who’d figured out how to have long-term heterosexual relationships without ceding their dignity or autonomy. So if Michael Cleary had a wide who was more beautiful than ordinary women, who wielded more control than ordinary women, who acted “too fine” for him or anyone, who had a habit of disappearing - well, he knew what to call her. If tradition had taught him anything, it was that a woman who insisted too much on being treated like a person was probably not a person at all. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Women’s adult sexuality - the kind that comes attached to female experience, agency, power in the world - is even more heavily demonised than the adolescent variety. An adolescent girl’s sexuality is frightening because it’s a way for her to slip out of her parents’ control. But once a girl slips her chain and becomes a woman, her sexuality stops being merely worrisome and becomes a threat. Sex is a valuable resource that men can never entirely alienate her from because it resides within her body.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

...humanity, for most of recorded history, has been defined as male. In the West, white men have told our stories, written our laws, made our definitions, dominated our arts and academies; when female experience has been accounted for at all, it has usually been a man doing the accounting. Women are defined from the outside, in terms of how they seem to men, rather than from the inside, as thinking, feeling subjects. They are not fellow people, not even a different or worse variety of people, but simply the opposite of men, and hence, the opposite of human. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

They seem beautiful and human at first glance, but when you examine them, their bodies are never quite right; they always bear some mark of the animal or the otherworldly. You can never fully understand these women, never fully pin them down, never love them; they are elusive, incomprehensible, practiced deceivers. You can live with one for years and still not see the snake that lives inside her skin.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

The twenty-first century, of course, does not really do swoons. We don’t really do fairies, either. We still have magical kidnappers, not-quite-human imposters, and inexplicable visitors from another world, but we call them aliens. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

It is luxuriantly, gorgeously terrible. 

-o-o-o-o-o

a psychic who does things like walk up to a gorily mutilated corpse and announce, using his psychic powers, “Something bad happened here!”

-0-0-0-0-0-0

Maybe you think I am exaggerating. Maybe it’s not actually that stupid. To which I reply: no. Whatever you are imagining, [movie] is much, much stupider than that. 

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

It is an artless, timeless, accidental blueprint of all the ways men fear female sexuality.

-o-o-o-o-

Yet Sil’s quest to fulfil every single female stereotype from a bad ‘90s stand-up routine is not really meant to amuse us. It’s meant to be terrifying. The fact that she’s feminine is what makes her monstrous - a Melusine whose dragon nature is always lurking just under the surface. Once a woman is free to desire and pursue her own desires, she moves beyond the reach of our empathy; she’s a threat that must be contained or destroyed.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Plenty of these portrayals [of animal seductress women] hint at more commonly concealed desires, which are less cannibalistic than they are “not heterosexual” .... The fear of female sexual liberation has always been partly a fear that women will develop desires that don’t include men. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

But there is another group of marginalised women who bear the brunt of our fears nowadays - made to hold the bag for our ideas of deceptive femininity and killer shape-shifters. Transgender women have always existed. But in literature, they have seldom been anything other than monsters. 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Monsters can be beautiful; possessed of a certain archaic, queenly violence or a joyful Lucy Western indifference to convention, .

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

[Elena] Rose calls monstrosity an ethos of “the cobbled-together, the sewn-up, the grafted-on ... the golden, the under-the-earth, the foreign, the travels-by-night; the filthy ship-sinking cave-dwelling bone-cracking gorgeousness that says hell no, I am not tidy. I am not easy.”

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

[fettesans]

Top, Barbara Kruger, Sex/Lure, 1979, Acrylic on black & white photograph, 30 x 40 inches. Via. Center and bottom, Manuel Cornelius, JetH, 2021, Gradually decaying agar jelly, food dye, 3d printed inner support structure. Via.

--

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." [...] 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.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Introduction to Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power, 2019. Via.

[rapeculturerealities]

In her acclaimed 2016 debut, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear … and Why, feminist author and cultural critic Sady Doyle dissected the ubiquitous American pastime of simultaneously idolizing and vilifying female celebrity. Her new book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, also looks at how the morass of misogyny poisons everything — including our psyches, our popular culture and our everyday lives. But this book focuses more intently on … horror.

Not the horror genre — though plenty of those examples are included — but about the horror of living as a woman in a violent patriarchal society that fears you, despises you; even wants you dead. Pulling from a broad range of cultural references, from Freud to Aristotle to the second-wave feminist theories of Dorothy Dinnerstein to obscure slasher films like The Mutilator, Doyle examines the myriad ways that the world is monstrous to women — and how the world has made monsters of us. “Women have always been monsters, too, in the minds of great men; in philosophy, medicine, and psychology, the inherest freakishness of women has always been a baseline assumption,” Doyle writes in the introduction. “A monster does not merely inspire anger, or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear.”

The fantastically smart book that follows is broken into sections covering the monstrousness associated with the entire socially-prescribed female life cycle, from the spark of adolescence; to marriage and motherhood (with their attendant domestic indignities); to the solitude of old age.

read more

[bigtickhk]

Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle https://amzn.to/2mfHV6k

[queerographies]

[Il mostruoso femminile][Jude Ellison Sady Doyle]

Se un mostro è un corpo spaventoso perché fuori controllo, una donna mostruosa è una donna libera dal controllo dell'uomo. [Il mostruoso femminile][Jude Ellison Sady Doyle]

Se un mostro è un corpo spaventoso perché fuori controllo, una donna mostruosa è una donna libera dal controllo dell’uomo. Il mostruoso femminile è un saggio sulla natura selvaggia della femminilità, che viaggia tra mito e letteratura, cronaca nera e cinema horror, mostrando la primordiale paura che il patriarcato nutre da sempre nei confronti delle donne. Da “L’esorcista” alla dea babilonese…

[ultrameganicolaokay]

Maw #1 by Jude Ellison S. Doyle and A.L. Kaplan. Cover by Ariela Kristantina. Variant covers by (2) Megan Hutchinson-Cates, (3) Abigail Jill Harding and (4) Tiffany Turrill. Out in September.

“What happens when one woman becomes the real monster society has always made her out to be? Dragged by her sister Wendy to a feminist retreat on the remote island of Angitia, Marion Angela Weber hopes to gain some perspective and empowerment... that isn't at the bottom of a bottle. But everything is horribly derailed after an assault on their first night there. The violent encounter awakens something in Marion she never imagined, triggering warped mutations in her body, and awakening a hunger she can't bring herself to name. When the townsfolk react with suspicion and violence, what unforgivable act will transform Marion into the very monster they've made her out to be? A provocative five-issue horror series by award-winning journalist and opinion writer Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power) and artist A.L. Kaplan (Full Spectrum Therapy) that explores the anger of women trapped by society's expectations and the reclamation of power through collective rage, perfect for readers of Redlands and Something is Killing the Children.”

[the-bitch-files]

The violence we’ve survived can be our guide to what needs to change. The fire that burned the witches can be the fire that lights our way.

Sady Doyle, “Conclusion: The Woman at the Edge of the Woods”, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power 

[gorgonapologist]

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

[miamiweisz]

what's your fave book you've read this year???

ok, I’m currently reading number 70 & 71, and I’ve read some GEMS so far this year, so this is really hard. Therefore, I cannot give you one lmao 

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevado (really recommend the audiobook, but the physical book is gorgeous). 

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett  

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

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado 

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson 

Vengeful by V.E Schwab (a sequel, read the first!) 

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo 

ok, ok, ok! I’ll stop. If you’re seriously interested in books and/or what I’m reading or loving, please follow my IG! I just bug my friends with books all damn day long lmao I would relish more people to talk books with!! x 

[notyourunclesam]

Iraq and Afghanistan killed 6,488 U.S. soldiers. In that same span of time, over 10,470 American women were murdered by their partners.

— Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, by Sady Doyle

A conflict with no exit strategy; the unending “War on Women.”

[snowman-aesthetic]

In the days and weeks after childbirth, life and death have a way of blurring together - they seem closer than you’d think, not two opposed points on a continuum but two sides of the same locked door. You, the formerly pregnant person, are bleeding, you are wounded, you have been in agony, all of which makes death feel very present; meanwhile, a person who was not alive is now in the world, proof that the life force itself has been in you and passed through you, a giant winged shadow gliding along the surface of the world. Birth is a moment when you touch the hidden mechanisms of the universe. It’s a time when you work wonders.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

But this story is older than Shelley. It’s older than anything you can recognise, or remember; it’s a story about the beginning, from the beginning, one which predates time and the written word. We have come to the heart of it now: the unspeakable, otherworldly thing lurking inside of womanhood, the power that all these tales of female demons and deviants foreshadow. Birth is not just monstrous; it doesn’t belong in out hall of fame alongside the snake-wife and the possessed teenager. It is the reason for those other myths, the source of monstrosity itself.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Deep in our culture’s imagination, in the sunless waters where our myths swim, the shape that moves through the darkness is female. The idea of a woman standing in the liminal point between life and death, ferrying us across the unknowable space between, has a primal power.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

And that power is monstrous. We may sentimentalise motherhood, or tell ourselves childbirth is “beautiful”, but our fears tell another story. The body of a pregnant woman - slimy, swollen, bleeding, leaking, teeming with other life - is the core repulsive image in patriarchal mythology. You can catch its warped, partial reflections in countless inhuman monstrosities, from the Alien franchise to Sumerian creation myths. That may not make actual pregnant women feel great; swollen joints and hormonal breakouts and distended abdominal muscles are hard enough without knowing that all of Western culture has deemed you inhumanly disgusting. But it may be some consolation to know that pregnant women’s bodies are horrific precisely because they confront men with the brute fact of female reproductive agency. To witness pregnancy and birth is to catch an unfiltered glimpse of a woman with power over life and death - power that men cannot take away. 

Men have striven mightily to claim that power for themselves, with witch trials and medical schools and anti-abortion laws all intended to put reproduction back in male hands. Yet what goes on in that pregnant body can never be entirely governed by laws or mastered by technology. It can’t even be controlled by the pregnant person; 

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Throughout history, millions have died in childbirth. In Renaissance Italy, the first thing a woman did after discovering she was pregnant was to write her own will. ... surviving childbirth, like every other kind of survival, is a privilege.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

So, no: giving birth is not “empowering”, in any facile girl-power, rah-rah way. But it is power - something only certain people can do, which is necessary to our collective survival. If women don’t give birth, the world ends - or humans do, anyway, which to us may as well be the same thing. It is not “empowering” for the Middle East to contain 82 percent of the world’s oil reserves - quite the opposite - but nations nevertheless rise and fall on the question of who controls that fuel. Every uterus is an oil well, a valuable and disputed resource, the object of a millennia-long turf war; if you happen to be sitting on one at the moment, don’t be surprised when invading forces show up to claim it out from under you.

Cisgender men fear that the territory they try to claim will rise up and resist them; that their strength will fail at the crucial moment, and power over reproduction - which is to say, power over humanity itself - will be wrested out of their hands. A pregnant woman is a woman who is finally, fully out of control. She is the face of horror.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

...violently paternal male gods who give commandments in good times and declare holy wars in bad ones. Nature may be generically female in this cosmology (we still talk about “Mother Nature”), but it is also depersonalised, soulless; it’s just dead matter (just dead mater, as in mater-ial and mater-nity; they come from the same root) that men are intended to control.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Modern translations of the Bible have corrected “man” to “humankind”. But it’s too late; the image of Man, specifically, controlling the earth and every creeping or female thing on it, has been built into the foundations of the culture. We have no space in our imagination for a power greater than Man, no animate Nature or Mother to fight back.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

Instead of telling stories about the necessity to master or subjugate that older, female power, men tell stories in which it never existed.

‘Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power’ - Sady Doyle

[seepunkrun]

The promise of patriarchy is that every man will exercise absolute power and control over at least one woman, and that lucky men will exercise power and control over other men as well. The evils of patriarchy—laws against gender transition, against same-sex marriage, against abortion, against anything that provides a challenge or a workable alternative to the nuclear family ruled by the male father/god—are inexhaustible. And the weakness of patriarchy—the big, red, 'DO NOT TOUCH THIS BUTTON' button, the exhaust vent on the Death Star of Western Civilization—is women.

Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, patriarchy, and the fear of female power