Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why by Sady Doyle Read Free Book Online Page A

women are not disconnected. The field for one has been fertilized (or, if you prefer, salted) by the other. Complex, deep, and necessary critiques—like the feminist critique of mainstream beauty standards, in Jenner’s or Beyoncé’s case, or the critique of class privilege, in Hilton’s case, or the antiracist critique of Cyrus’s appropriation of black aesthetics and the industry’s simultaneous dismissal of black artists (Nicki Minaj wound up having to make a few)—are appropriated and imitated by the mainstream to rationalize our culture’s underlying pattern of demolishing sexually unruly women. And even socially conscious women (myself very much included, I must admit) can easily fall into age-old and socially encouraged habits of punishing sinners, unaware of which patterns have taken hold until it’s too late. Exposure and punishment, sexual transgression and murderous rage: The cycle holds, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. We keep women’s bodies controlled, and women themselves in fear, with the public immolation of any sexual person who is or seems feminine, keeping even “private” women inhibited by reminding them of the catastrophe that will ensue if they live out their desires too freely.
    Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses,Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they’ve done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women’s bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it’s only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you’ve told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.

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    The sex in the Wollstonecraft (or GamerGate) scandal was only half the story. The story of a woman happily fucking her way across the world stage would, no doubt, enrage a large portion of the population. But half the point of creating a villainess is being able to witness her downfall. It’s in the breakdown—the messy, pleading letters, the self-loathing chat transcript, the suicide attempt, the broken relationship, the vision of a woman being punished with total emotional collapse—that the appeal of the trainwreck narrative really lies.
    The big sales pitch for ideals of feminine purity, after all, is that they make women happy. If a woman keeps it together and plays by the rules, she supposedly gains safety, approval, love, and the glowing sense of well-being that only comes from not being chased down the street by people who think she’s an unholy bitch. If a woman strays from the path, however, she pays for it. And not just because wemake her. Her lack of virtue makes her unlovable and corrodes her from within.
    The truthfulness of this is, well—what’s the most polite way to say this?—horseshit. There are plenty of well-behaved women living lives of quiet desperation, just as there are no doubt plenty of reckless women having the time of their lives. But trainwreck narratives seize on the stories that serve the sales pitch: the one where the bad girl gets hurt in the end.
    If sex is one of the easiest ways for a woman to invite hatred and mockery in our culture—to be labeled a slut, a deviant, or any one of the many unprintable slurs that we use to mean “transgender woman”—then ceasing to have sex with someone should be a reliable solution to the problem. And yet, it is not so. Breakups, you see, lead to sadness, and also to anger. And, instead of admitting that women feel unpleasant emotions when they’re in unpleasant situations, we have a tendency to label any public display as bitter, vindictive, obsessive, pathetic, desperate or, yes,