Like every modern feminist text, just read it. It is crucial. It can help save humankind.
"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."
— Margaret Atwood.
And men do kill women. All the time.
It's a well known fact that men have always feared women. And because fear, like nearly every emotion aside from anger, is not allowed in men by the patriarchy, lest they be mocked and labelled as un-masculine and a "pussy" (read: like a woman, a fate worse than death), they turn that fear into hate. In their hate, they turn women into monsters, in every sense imaginable, to justify their violence against them. Thus putting her in her place since time immemorial.
If men didn't hate and fear women, they wouldn't go to such lengths to keep her small, scared herself, subdued, silent, nonthreatening and non-domineering. In every aspect of her existence - puberty, menstruation, sexual awakening, virginity, sex, marriage, non-marriage, motherhood, spinsterhood, healthcare, birth control, abortion, her very life - the patriarchy seeks to put under the control of men. If everything that makes a woman a woman - or simply just a person - is universally seen as monstrous, wrong, sick, and unnatural, then of course, any excuse to slay and/or control her. By demonizing (sometimes literally) women and girls and their experiences, men's violent oppression against them is seen as not even a necessary evil, but necessary.
Because the patriarchy was created out of fear of women's brilliant power - which must be suppressed, through fear, at all costs.
Dehumanizing the female sex - and other sexes, sexual identities, and people who aren't male, white, straight, cisgender, and able-bodied - was apparently the rational thing to do to maintain male rule. Marriage is an institution like any other - originally a slave trade and prison sentence. The idea of the nuclear family was also invented as a pretence in order to keep women subjugated.
In 'Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power', Sady Doyle goes to great detail into this cultural misogyny and more. Real life and pop culture are rife with women-as-monsters-or-victims-or-both stories. Women have to be either or both, so she can be blamed for absolutely everything. It is sickening and horrific, and thanks to the patriarchy, it is normalized. It is part of our everyday life. Doyle also talks about transgender, LBGTQ, and non-binary issues; people who barely manage to survive the violence of the stifling and deadly patriarchy. It is a commendable, woke, socially conscious insight.
The book misses a star because it can be muddled structurally at times. However, its completely justified frustrations show in its writing. Sady Doyle is strong and fearless.
Whether her transition from innocent childhood to sexual womanhood is demonized; whether showing any signs of sexuality, freedom and individuality means she deserves rape and death; whether she's a mother who's "domineering" and doesn't love her son enough, or who loves him too much, hence he becomes gay or a serial killer - both are viewed as equally repugnant by the patriarchy...actually to be gay and a "sissy" momma's boy who may want to be a woman himself is worse; whether she's a working mother or not; whether she's a dutiful, smiling, uncomplaining Stepford wife or not; in every aspect of living, women are monsters according archaic order of the patriarchy, and women just can't win no matter what they do.
This systematic oppression functions so that women will always be doomed to fail. Misogyny - the systematic, violent, fragile, weak, evil, unfounded fear and hatred of all women - means that females are monsters that must be slain on some level.
'Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers' will scare you. That's a good thing.
Let's all be witches and put a stop to this - start a revolution! Now more than ever in this time of moral panic and widespread male lies that are being implicitly believed socially. It's time to shout out once and for all that misogyny is the monstrosity, not the existence of women.
Women have ruled the world before. We are the apocalypse. Let's help to end this irrational, unpractical, male-controlled world that has never worked for anyone and has never made anybody happy and safe. Let's build a new, secure, joyful, and hopeful one. A world of human freedom.
Because really, every misogynistic man is deep down just a scared little boy crying out for his mother.
Final Score: 4/5
“We would rather see girls stopped dead—stuck in a constant childhood that never decays—than let them grow into women who can pursue their desires.”
[...]
“If you want to understand our sexual state of play, start with the fact that a man who kills half a hundred female sex workers is shown more mercy than a female sex worker who defends herself against seven men.”
[...]
“It’s rare for the patriarchy to show its hand this clearly, but there you go; guilt, not joy, kept Mama in place. Women had to be confined to childbearing and child-rearing, but they also had to believe there was something wrong with them if they didn’t enjoy it.”
— Sady Doyle
"To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?"
— Mahatma Gandhi, 1930
"..."Fun?" you ask. "Weren't feminists these grim-faced, humorless, antifamily, karate-chopping ninjas who were bitter because they couldn't get a man?" Well, in fact the problem was that all too many of them HAD gotten a man, married him, had his kids, and then discovered that, as mothers, they were never supposed to have their own money, their own identity, their own aspirations, time to pee, or a brain. And yes, some women indeed became bad-tempered as a result. After all, no anger, no social change."
— Susan J. Douglas
“Feminism is hated because women are hated. Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.”
— Andrea Dworkin
“I’m a feminist. I’ve been a female for a long time now. It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.”
— Maya Angelou
“We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half.”
— Emmeline Pankhurst
“Feminism isn’t about making women strong. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.”
— G.D. Anderson
“Women’s chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy.”
— Estelle R. Ramey
“The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”
— Lucretia Mott
“Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it's the latter, so I sign up.”
― Margaret Atwood
“No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half its citizens.”
— Michelle Obama
"I've thought often about why - why?! - anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I've come up with, and I think it makes sense, is fear of becoming that "impure" woman."
— Jessica Valenti
"Centuries of social conditioning has created a generational fear among women of being perceived as masculine. This is where all the shaming and labels come into play, which perpetuate the oppression of girls and women. As a society we shame girls with deep voices or masculine features and we shame boys with soft voices or effeminate gestures. Girls get called "too manly" and boys get called "too girly". The only solution I can think of is to be unashamedly "you". If that means challenging stereotypes and gender norms, go right ahead!"
— Miya Yamanouchi
“[Rape is] nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
― Susan Brownmiller
“Why is it that men can be bastards and women must wear pearls and smile?”
― Lynn Hecht Schafran
"The education and empowerment of women throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring, tolerant, just and peaceful life for all."
— Aung San Suu Kyi
“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they are asking to do it, the men better let them.”
— Sojourner Truth
“The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
“If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”
— Mary Astell
“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."
— Nora Ephron
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