Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers Read online

  DEAD BLONDES AND BAD MOTHERS

  Copyright © Sady Doyle, 2019

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: August 2019

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY11201

  and

  Suite 2000

  16/18Woodford Road

  London E70HA

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 9781612197920

  Ebook ISBN 9781612197937

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Marina Drukman

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019943705

  v5.4

  a

  For my daughter—may she be ferocious.

  If it were not for some power that wanted the feminine sex to exist, the birth of a woman would be an accident such as that of other monsters.

  —Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate

  Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him…. I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.

  —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Domestic Terror

  Part I

  DAUGHTERS

  1. Puberty

  2. Virginity

  Part II

  WIVES

  3. Seduction

  4. Marriage

  Part III

  MOTHERS

  5. Birth

  6. Family

  7. Bad Mothers

  Conclusion: The Woman at the Edge of the Woods

  Appendix: Resource Guide

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  DOMESTIC TERROR

  DRIVER: You girls watch out for those weirdos.

  NANCY: We are the weirdos, mister.

  —The Craft (1996)

  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.”1 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.”2 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 believein 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.3 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.

  * * *

  —

  The idea that men fear women feels faintly ludicrous—like an elephant panicking at the sight of a mouse, or a professional exterminator with a fear of spiders. We’re told that terror is feminine, and that women are the more fearful gender. What else do you mean, when you call a guy a pussy?

  Nevertheless, that fear is real. Historically, men have believed that women can destroy cities by having sex (as with Helen of Troy or the anonymous, libidinous mother of the Monster of Ravenna) or control the weather with their bodies (a witch could create a storm by letting down her hair; a woman could calm a hurricane by standing naked on the deck of a ship), or just reduce men to mindless, obedient animals (Circe, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, leaving a bloody trail of husbands and horny insurance salesmen in her wake). In the darker corners of the Internet, you’ll find frightened men discussing the “Red Pill,” an imaginary conspiracy in which all-powerful, man-hating feminists have rigged the modern world to suppress men and deny them human rights.

  It’s easy to roll your eyes at the tinfoil-hat talk, but male fear is serious: it kills women every day. We’ve all grown up with the image of some inconvenient female villager killed for “witchcraft,” her community’s misogynist paranoia wrapping around her throat like a noose. Just as with those long-ago panics, some of the men who believe in the Red Pill conspiracy—spree killer Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian, who drove a van into a mostly female crowd in Toronto—have murdered innocent women in the name of “defending” themselves from female power. The precise nature of the accusations might change, but men’s underlying distrust of women remains constant.

  Fear of women may be the single most important truth of misogyny. A cage, after all, has two purposes. Of course, it serves to keep women confined, hemmed in—to prevent us from going out into m
ale territory and getting what men have, the jobs and money and respect and power that are so much more accessible if you’re male. But the second purpose of a cage—the more interesting one—is to protect the world from what is inside it. On some level, the cage exists to keep women from getting out.

  I wrote this book because I want to understand what these men are afraid of. I want to know the beast they feel breathing down their necks in the dark. Ready to break through at last. Ready to eat them.

  * * *

  —

  The root of female monstrosity, I’ve found, lies right where Revelations and Freud said it did: in sex, and the potent magic generated by sex, the creation of new human beings.

  The word patriarchy gets flung around a lot. As a younger woman, I delighted in using it—most often with a laugh in my voice, a flourish intended to underline the irony of a sex-positive, man-loving feminist in her twenties invoking such a militant idea. If I wanted to be serious, I would say sexism. I would use some newer phrase like rape culture. Patriarchy was redolent of severe movement haircuts and problematic white women hollering about the Equal Rights Amendment. It was old-fashioned, unsexy. You could say I liked the word patriarchy because it took itself so seriously, which I, being young and cool, was forbidden to do.

  I am, thank God, neither young nor cool anymore. I am also significantly less man-loving, having spent more time with men. And patriarchy—the core structure of it, the big meaning behind the big word—demands serious examination.

  Patriarchy is not sexism. It creates sexism, and it necessitates sexism, but it’s deeper than that. Patriarchy is not male violence or rape culture, either. It requires and exults male violence, particularly sexual violence, but patriarchy runs deeper than the things done to defend it. Patriarchy is a cultural and moral hegemony that mandates one specific, supposedly “natural” family structure—a man using a woman to create and raise “his” children, with father exercising indisputable authority over mother and children alike—and on a grander scale, builds societies that look and function like patriarchal families, ruled by all-powerful male kings and presidents and CEOs and gods.

  I should say up top that there are other ways to drill down into oppression, other structures that coexist with patriarchy and help to maintain it: white supremacy, or capitalism, or heterosexism. You can dig into the foundations of the world from any number of angles, and you will always hit some or all of these other structures on your way down. But patriarchy rewards a specific focus. It is the big truth behind the countless smaller truths of sexism, the brutal foundation for all the violence that tears through women’s lives.

  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. If women as a whole—not some women, or a particular privileged class of women, but all of us, en masse—refuse to cede our sexual or personal autonomy, the whole thing falls apart.

  Because patriarchy has been sold to us as “natural,” its mechanisms are hard to perceive. It manifests in the average woman’s life as a series of overlapping and interlocking forms of violence, intended to domesticate her wild self into useful breeding stock. This means that our clearest perception of it usually comes through fear: fear of being raped, groped, hit, beaten, stalked, targeted for online mob harassment by an obsessive ex or colleague, or just followed down the street by a man who catcalled you and got enraged that you wouldn’t respond. Fear of male violence is what reminds women that we are not people yet, and that men are still able to put tight limits on our lives.

  But all of that violence comes, on some level, from the knowledge that women are potentially formidable. Men fear women, even as they work to make women fear men, because, on the most basic level, male dominance is an illusion. For patriarchy to work, men have to control literally every facet of sex and family life—who has sex, with whom, and when and whether they get pregnant, who owns the child, and who cares for it—and given the unruly nature of sex and birth, this control is perpetually slipping out of their grasp. Patriarchy is inherently unsustainable: It is not possible to control another human being at every moment of every day. It is not possible to control what (or who) women want. It is not possible to own a resource that is located inside someone else’s body, which sex and reproduction always are. And if women realized how fragile male control is, everything might change.

  So, by constructing patriarchy, men make monsters: the twisted, slimy, devouring, mutating, massively powerful images of female desire and sexuality and motherhood that take place outside of patriarchy. Monsters are the children that aren’t supposed to exist, the feral desires we’ve fought to repress and forget, the outsiders waiting at the edge of our social world to confront us, the primeval, female body that gives and takes life without permission. Men’s dread of this power has given rise to countless, bluntly anatomical nightmares: corrupting uteruses, poisonous blood, women who have slimy, serpentine tails instead of vaginas, or snakelike, elastic jaws that swallow men whole, or “castrated” women whose bodies are open wounds. A monster is a supposed-to-be-subjugated body that has become threatening and voracious—a woman who is, in the most basic sense, out of (men’s) control.

  Monster stories let us directly perceive the script of male dominance and female subjugation, which is usually just a set of nameless anxieties fluttering under and around our day-to-day interactions. The definition of monstrosity may be fluid—in conversation, “he’s a monster” could mean fifty-foot lizard Godzilla or serial killer Norman Bates—but whether the monster violates social norms, biological norms, or both, these stories are always exceptionally clear on the stakes. The monster, the thing that exists outside of our acceptable roles and definitions, must be killed, or the system will collapse. The dragon will burn the village; the dinosaurs will roam through Jurassic Park; the xenomorph will eat the whole space colony; the Whore of Babylon will mount the Beast, and the abominations born of her lust will devour the world.

  Monsters haunt powerful men with the knowledge that their control is only temporary; that women are canny creatures, and the cage of patriarchy is flimsier than it looks, and it is only a matter of time until we find our way out. In Greek, apokálypsis means “uncovering,” the revealing of a hidden truth; it means finding something powerful and important buried underneath what we think we know. So, in a way, all those men were right: the apocalypse really is female. This one is, anyway.

  * * *

  —

  We can use monster stories to trace the shape of patriarchy; the key junctures in a woman’s life when male control and violence are deployed to domesticate her sexuality or her reproductive agency into something less fearsome, and the monstrosities that invariably show up at these junctures, justifying male violence by demonstrating what the patriarchy fears women may become. This is a work of apokálypsis, of countermythology, unearthing female power by breaking down the stories built to contain or disguise it. Somewhere at the root of all our ideas about women’s wickedness, there is a primordial, matriarchal power; something as dark and vast and ancient as an ocean. By examining the ways that women have been demonized, we may find our way to its shore.

  When there are real, historical women who have been designated monsters, I’ve included them here. When there are relevant mythic or literary monsters, I’ve included them, too. But this book also pivots around twentieth and twenty-first-century ephemeralia: slumber party games, urban legends, true-crime documentaries, and lots and lots of horror movies. In the realm of the monstrous, truth an
d fiction tend to blend together. It only makes sense that a book like this would require a bit of Frankensteining; the creature currently lumbering toward you has been stitched together from urban legends, serial-killer depositions, nineteenth-century poems, ’90s blockbusters about sexy lady aliens—anything that illuminates the hideously, frighteningly female.

  In examining how women are threatened and coerced into fulfilling sexual norms, we do, admittedly, have to spend a lot of time on the norms themselves. Each part of this book—“Daughters,” “Wives,” and “Mothers”—is centered around one of the three acceptable roles a woman can play within patriarchy, and the violence it takes to keep her in that box. This book devotes lots of space to heterosexual sex and marriage, not because all women are heterosexual and monogamous, but because they are all pressured to be so; it gets into the weeds on menstruation, pregnancy, and motherhood, not because all women menstruate or get pregnant or raise children, but because those processes have been made to signify the totality of womanhood.

  The goal is never to exalt those processes, let alone to suggest that you have to experience them to be a “real” woman, but to ask why they matter so much—and to reveal the sheer level of force it takes to keep a woman’s life limited to that one particular, preordained shape. The book alternates between talking about the female monsters who exist outside of patriarchy and the female victims who exist within it, the bad mothers who threaten male rule and the dead blondes who are its intended outcome; if there’s one thing I’ve learned by studying monsters, it’s that fantasies about violent women usually conceal realities about violent men.

  This is a dark book, but some things are clearer in the darkness. This is a violent book, but an unsparing confrontation with violence can bring us to what lies beneath and beyond it. Female monstrosity inspires terror because it really can end the world—or our current version of it, anyway. But our world is not the only one, or the best one, and in fact, the more time I spend with monsters, the more I think its destruction is overdue.