#sady doyle

[funeral]

In folk belief, magic is often said to accumulate around liminal moments—points of transition, places where something is neither A nor B but both at once. Brides, for example, are vulnerable to malevolent magic because they are neither married nor unmarried; hence, our extensive array of superstitions around weddings. Midnight is the witching hour because it is neither today nor tomorrow. In ancient Greece and Rome, ghosts supposedly appeared at both midnight and noon, since noon was another hinge point in the day; it was the state of in-betweenness, not the dark, that allowed them to manifest. Adolescence is one of the most frightening and protracted forms of liminality, a time when someone is neither a child nor an adult, but can seem like either, or both. ...A girl's first period—blood shed, simultaneously, by a woman, and child, and the moon—rips a hole in the world.

Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

[haggishlyhagging]

Nearly every terrible thing about our sexual politics comes down to the fact that, in patriarchy, patriarchs understand themselves to be inessential. Conservatives defend “family” and fatherhood as if they're under violent attack. That's because, as long as women are self-determined and possessed of options, they are. The twenty-first-century war to maintain patriarchy includes not just legislative attacks on the right to abortion, but on birth control, and sex education, which allows people to successfully avoid pregnancy in the first place. The fear here, despite generations of rhetoric to the contrary, is not about “killing babies”; men have always reserved the right to kill or at least abandon babies that displease them, usually after they leave the womb. The fear is that women will be the ones making the decisions; it is not death, but life, that we want to keep out of women's hands.

-Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

[mala-santa-radfem]

8/10, it's great if you like media analysis. there's some gender bullshit but i skipped most of it.

[litandlifequotes]

Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles.

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why by Sady Doyle

[imaginemirage]

A little girl is less a person than she is a portal. At any moment, she can crack open and something else can come slithering through.

Sady Doyle

[random-bookquotes]

Girls and young women wolfed down Gothic novels, which—like Scream and Lifetime movies—provided a rare public forum through which women could discuss the day-to-day dangers they faced. No other genre was so focused on the evil men do to the women in their lives. The Gothic turned everyday family life inside out to produce anxiety nightmares of unnatural and illegitimate reproduction, child abuse, sexual perversion, and—most importantly, for our purposes—untrustworthy, violent husbands.

Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

[paulaangel]

Or perhaps it comes down to a simple need to feel good about ourselves-- a need to believe that someone else in this world is doing worse, or just is worse, than we are. It's an ugly little facet of human nature, but it's unavoidable: we define ourselves by exclusion, by rejecting or shaming others as a means of proving that we don't share their flaws.

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

[gorgonapologist]

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