Contemporary Authors

What Do We Really Mean When We Call A Woman A "Trainwreck"?
ELIZABETH KIEFER
SEPTEMBER 26, 2016, 1:00 PM

We all know what it means to call someone a trainwreck. It refers to a person who has gone off the rails — a hot mess who always seems to be in the headlines (or your newsfeed) for the wrong reasons. A pop star who shaves her head in the midst of an emotional breakdown, a child actress who gets arrested for a DUI. One thing these trainwrecks almost always seem to have in common? They're women.

But where did that word come from — and what does the word's usage really mean about the way women are viewed in our culture at large? Those are just a few questions at the center of a new book by Sady Doyle titled Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... And Why?

Doyle's position, in part, is that the word trainwreck is just a repackaging of how women have been cut down to size since pretty much the dawn of time: Today's trainwreck is yesteryear's hysterical female. We talked to Doyle about "crazy" women, the words we use to control them, and why stories about crazy dudes seem to disappear into the ether. (Funny how that works, isn't it?) Read our interview in full, below.
So here's the big question: Is it actually getting better for women in the world, or is that just something we have to tell ourselves?
"There are a cultural shifts going on— I talk about it a little bit in the book. For example, sex tapes, revenge porn — it used to be you'd go into a feminist sex store and they would have [Paris Hilton's sex tape] 1 Night in Paris. They sold it at Babeland, and the question of whether the release of that tape was consensual — which it wasn’t — never came up. Now we’re a lot more sensitive to that, to how hacking someone, stealing nude images, stealing their sex tape or publishing it without permission, how all of that is a form of sexual assault. I think that we are not exactly more sensitive about people’s mental health issues: You’ll still read things about how you know Taylor Swift is a psychopath or Jennifer Aniston is a sad old woman. She’s married, but I still feel like we get those because she doesn’t have a baby."

Psycho.
"Yeah, how dare you [laughs]. I think we are certainly not as carnivorous in regards to celebrities as we were before Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse passed away: I think those two were kind of watershed moments where people started to reconsider. But the other problem is that now we do this to each other. We have way more social media trainwrecks than we used to. We’ve downgraded trainwrecks to the point that we’re no longer as voracious and as ferocious toward celebrities. But only because we have a bunch of way easier targets to hit — and our control over them and our ability to hurt them is much greater.”

Was there a pop culture tipping point when you just thought: Okay, that's enough, I need to write a book about this now?
"I don’t know that it was just one tipping point — this started as sort of a genesis of an idea when I was reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters to Gilbert Imlay. Gilbert Imlay is a man that Mary Wollstonecraft had a live-in relationship with, who basically abandoned her but didn’t say that was what he was doing. I was fascinated by this, because these letters, when you read them, are urgent and human and come from a place of such obvious agony. Mary Wollstonecraft had always been presented to me as,‘Well she’s a feminist. She’s a strong feminist women and she had good solid ideas, like ladies being able to vote and go to school.’

"I was in Texas, and Fiona Apple was performing down the block, [and I got to thinking about] her having spent pretty much her entire career being called crazy every time she was sad in public or having a bad day. It struck me that this vulnerability had been sort of excised out of our accounts of women we had decided to revere — but [at the same time], vulnerability had been used as an excuse to ignore the accomplishments or the humanity of women today. I started trying to create sort of like a weird conspiracy theory chart. Like, ‘Well, what about Emily Dickinson? What role does she play in this? What about that Alanis Morissette song? Everybody made fun of her for that.’ My weird conspiracy chart [was] ready to roll [in] 2014, when somebody asked me to write a book and I was like, ‘Yes! Women who are called crazy, now the chart springs into action.'"
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PHOTO: ILLUSTRATED BY ABBY WINTERS.
Author Sady Doyle.
How did the word "trainwreck" fit into all this?
"Trainwreck as a concept was so compelling — it was such an easy short hand for these women. I really started with an idea of exploring the archetype. We have always stereotyped women as crazy — you can find women you know talking about, ‘Well I’m just upset, I’m not crazy.’ But women who actually are 'crazy,' women who actually do go through really painful illnesses or painful times in their lives; they have historically always been used as spectacles to scare the rest of us back into line and to keep us in mind of what we look like."

This idea that women need to be scared straight, so to speak, pops up a lot in the book. But the other side of that, it seems, is that <>
"There is a fear of women; there is a fear of who women will be if they are not obedient, if they don’t 'correctly' perform femininity in the way its laid out for them. The reason we examine women so ferociously for signs that they are physically out of control or emotionally out of control is that there is this feeling that if you took the chains off, women would just run lose — they’d cause chaos. One really easy way to keep someone from stepping into her power is to convince her that she is broken. I think that we display women who are sexually assertive or who are emotional or even who are even very opinionated as monsters, as broken people, just to keep women from really being able to step into their own lives and into their own power."

This sounds a whole lot like what has happened to Hillary Clinton over the years, which you talk about in the book.
"Oh yeah, absolutely. I think Hillary Clinton — especially on the campaign trail in 2008 and now — has been surveyed for signs that she is either on death's door or having some kind of emotional freak-out. You could go back to the infamous crying speech in New Hampshire, where if you watch the video, she seems like she’s speaking softly and her voice is a little hoarse, but it was definitely portrayed as, 'Hillary Clinton can’t stand losing, is having an emotional meltdown.'

"People have these fantasies about Hillary Clinton being somehow permanently broken, because she’s an exceptionally powerful woman. Our cultural imagination can’t contain that, unless she only exists to be this powerful so she can implode. We still operate in this space where women can be superhuman or subhuman, they can be angels or they can be demons; but being a human with off days is not something that we’re really good at allowing female people."

There's also this hunger to watch powerful women — Hillary Clinton, celebrities, women in the spotlight — fail, and to consume that failure as media.
"Hillary Clinton is a really good example of this, [the idea that] we have the right to consume someone’s internal life and their narrative and their personality, that it can balloon outward and outward until the desire for content leads us to the place where we’re reading articles about her brain damage. There’s no evidence that it exists. But the myth takes over and it’s not even connected to the woman anymore.”

Is there any connection between your book, Trainwreck, and Amy Schumer's movie, Trainwreck, or is that all purely coincidental?
"No and no. I’m gonna glide right over that."

Okay then. One intersection I saw between the two, though, was that while we have all these trainwreck stories about women, there is a complete dearth of stories about crazy men. Where are those stories, do you think? Because obviously there are crazy men in the world.
"I think that because we have more rooms for men’s emotional lives — because men have always been more privileged to tell their own stories — when a guy is in a love story, we tend to assume that he’s the subject and the women is the object. That he is the one who thinks and feels and breathes and pines and chases and dumps... Mel Gibson was a pretty crazy boyfriend: There’s a lot of violent, terrifying stuff that he said to his former partner. You could argue that Robin Thicke and his weird meltdown around being divorced from his wife would fit the narrative of a crazy ex-boyfriend. Like: You left me and my entire next album is about how I’m going to win you back.
“
ONE REALLY EASY WAY TO KEEP SOMEONE FROM STEPPING INTO HER POWER IS TO CONVINCE HER THAT SHE IS BROKEN.
SADY DOYLE
”
"Because we have room for men’s subjectivity we can understand that, like, Lloyd Dobler [from Say Anything] is not a serial killer when he’s out there on the lawn with his boom box: He’s just sad. We don’t have that same space for women: Women are meant to be ideal objects that get related to. [A woman] should want someone exactly as much as they want you, no more no less. So if you want something that the other person doesn’t want — if you’re sad, if you’re out there on the lawn with a boom box as a lady — I hate to tell you, you are getting arrested. He will never stop telling the story about how terrifying you are."

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... And Why? was released on September 20, 2016.

Sady Doyle is the author of Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why (Melville House 2016), a book on how we build up and tear down rebellious women, from the French Revolution to Perez Hilton. It has been called "smart, funny and fearless" (Boston Globe), "compelling" and "persuasive" (New York Times Book Review), and "a deeply researched account of our culture’s misogynistic obsession with trainwrecks (Portland Mercury); The Atlantic predicted that "Trainwreck will very likely join the feminist canon."

While waiting to join the feminist canon, to which she will bring a bag of Takis and some board games, Sady is a journalist living in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2008, she founded the feminist blog Tiger Beatdown. While at Tiger Beatdown, she led several successful social media awareness campaigns, including #MooreandMe and #MenCallMeThings, and won the Women's Media Center Social Media Award in 2011.

Sady has also been a staff writer at In These Times Magazine and Rookie Magazine (her pieces can be found in Rookie: Yearbook One and Yearbook Two) and contributed several pieces to the bestselling Book of Jezebel. Her work appears regularly at Elle.com, QZ, and more.

In addition to all of the above, she's spoken at Harvard, SXSW, and Netroots Nation. Her pieces have appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Awl, Buzzfeed, and all across the Internet. If you'd like to ask Sady to give a talk, or to write for you, please do come say hi.
BOOKS

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why, by Sady Doyle
Rookie: Yearbook One, ed. Tavi Gevinson
Rookie: Yearbook Two, ed. Tavi Gevinson
The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things, by Kate Harding & Amanda Hess, ed. Anna Holmes

ARTS & CULTURE 10/06/2016 08:22 am ET | Updated Jan 27, 2017
Why Tearing Women Down Gives Us A Thrill
“Trainwreck,” Sady Doyle’s new book on the women we love to hate, provides a necessary lens for how we think about public women.
By Claire Fallon

MELVILLE HOUSE, GETTY
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A couple years ago, we hated Anne Hathaway.

Remember that? Maybe you (specifically) still do. Maybe you (specifically) never did. But it’s true. We hated her big, effortful smile. We hated how she tremulously murmured “it came true” when accepting an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. We hated her molars and uvula, visible thanks to some close camera work as she belted “I Dreamed a Dream” in “Les Misérables,” the film for which she won that Oscar. We hated how she let us see her trying. We hated how she reminded us of our own need to be liked and our own carefully disguised efforts to impress.

Jennifer Lawrence, the starlet who tripped over her gown at the Academy Awards and professed her love for junk food ― she was genuine, America’s effortlessly perfect dream bestie. Until she wasn’t.

This cycle might feel painfully familiar: We anoint an It Girl, a beloved female icon, then rapidly begin to find things to despise about her. Soon she’s left torn and trampled in the dirt as we rush past her to the next victim.

In Sady Doyle’s sharp new book Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why, she examines the particular pleasure our society has taken, for centuries, in tearing down publicly visible women. Early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, French revolutionary Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt, and Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, all suffered the same calculated public humiliations and dismissals that were later faced in different forms by Sylvia Plath, Billie Holiday, Britney Spears and Whitney Houston.

“It’s easy to look at these women and see what they did wrong, tally up their sins and errors,” writes Doyle in the preface of Trainwreck: “Insensitive, provocative, promiscuous, off-the-wagon, crazy.” Many of them were deeply, seriously flawed people; all of them were flawed, of course, because humans are. By highlighting the same destructive pattern, though, Doyle reveals how quick our society is to discard flawed women ― baby, bathwater and all ― then blame them for forcing us to get rid of the baby because they tainted the bathwater.

She details the arc of classic ‘90s trainwreck Monica Lewinsky, a counterpoint to the equally loathed Hillary Clinton (“The icy blonde and the overheated brunette, the prude and the slut, the shrewish wife and the trashy mistress, the sexless middle-aged woman and the trampy young one, the frigid, man-hating intellectual and the needy, man-hungry ditz”) and notes that ultimately, to American society, “neither woman was acceptable. Neither woman was deemed worthy of love, or even of being liked.”

Then came Britney Spears, the perfect Madonna/whore middle ground, whom Doyle casts as a reaction to the Clinton/Lewinsky villainesses. “To save herself from the hatred that defined the public lives of Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the ideal woman would have to steer between them, like Scylla and Charybdis,” she argues, “navigating the currents without being swept toward either side: Virgin and pin-up, wide-eyed innocent and worldly temptress, icon of cool and conservative Christian role model, she would always have to be both and neither, everything and nothing.” And yet Britney, too, suffered a much-derided public downfall.

Our trainwrecks, Trainwreck shows us, are constantly generated as reactions to our era’s anxieties and bigotries, or as backlashes to what we thought we wanted before. We ask women to fulfill the roles we require, then despise them for spoon-feeding us, or for not spoon-feeding us well enough ― that’s how we arrived at Kristin Stewart (who didn’t try hard enough or smile hard enough), then Anne Hathaway (who tried too hard and smiled too hard), then Jennifer Lawrence (who did both too ... just right). And, of course, that’s how we arrived at hating them.

We ask women to fulfill the roles we require, then despise them for spoon-feeding us, or for not spoon-feeding us well enough.
Doyle’s book doesn’t arrive out of thin, misogynistic air; she’s one of many feminist writers and agitators who’ve been calling out this dynamic in essays and on Twitter for years. Though past stars’ falls from grace (Britney, Lindsay Lohan) have been covered with wide-eyed surprise, outlets like Jezebel forecasted a backlash against Jennifer Lawrence during her reign of unrivaled popularity. So did Lawrence herself, who said in an interview, “I feel like I’m becoming way too much [...] They like me now, but I’m going to get really annoying really fast. Just watch.”

In recent years, the growing number of feminist-oriented women’s news sites have picked up on the reality that female celebrities face harsher scrutiny, and more intense hatred, spurred on by these hints from the stars themselves. Hathaway, who makes her living as a Hollywood actress, rather heartbreakingly told HuffPost in 2014, “My impression is that people needed a break from me.”

As with other feminist issues, the past few years has seen a surge of awareness in the media, and a reckoning of sorts. Doyle notes that celebrities like Spears and Miley Cyrus have tried to harness the power of their notoriety, to varying degrees of success. Others, like Lawrence and Hathaway, have gently critiqued the viciously fickle nature of audiences. Writers have penned think pieces that, though less likely to be mocked, were preceded by Chris Crocker’s viral video “Leave Britney Alone” (to which Doyle gives due attention in Trainwreck). The media and audiences have grown more aware that our tendency to tear public women to shreds is unfair, sexist, damaging to gender equality.

Still, women in public aren’t yet equal. And if you were suffering under that delusion, Trainwreck is particularly illuminating, a reminder that the moment when a problem, in its most obvious form, has become taboo might actually be the most dangerous moment. In fact, it’s a perfect opportunity for that problem to hide in a more sneaky form. If we’re all being more careful not to hate on women for smiling, for suffering from a mental illness or for being sexually active while in the public eye, chances are we’ll find other reasons to disproportionately target women for over-the-top takedowns: bitchiness, insensitivity, offensiveness, and other crimes that might ruin a woman’s reputation more effectively than assault allegations could ruin a man’s.

Doyle writes that “[t]he trainwreck is the inverse of what a woman ought to be.” In a time when “Are you a feminist?” is a de rigeur interview question for starlets, there’s another set of criteria for what a woman ought to be ― not replacing the old one, certainly, but in addition. Women today are asked to maintain their sexiness, receptiveness, agreeableness and caring natures, as detailed in Trainwreck, but also be strong, independent, and politically aware. When Rihanna got back together with Chris Brown after he’d badly beaten her, Doyle points out, she had neither the support of the Brown stans (who’d always blamed her for their hero’s downfall) nor of the purportedly pro-woman crowd who berated her for setting a bad example. “[I]t was always Rihanna’s responsibility not to be abused,” she writes, “and, no matter what she did, she was always blamed for any abuse that did or could happen.”

We always have female targets who are considered correct to hate out of all proportion; it’s only the rationales that change. If we passionately despise Taylor Swift, it’s not because she strikes us as too girly and too obsessed with her brand and her ex-boyfriends ― it’s because it’s offensive that she lied about whether she approved Kanye West’s line about her on the track “Famous.” If we loathe Lena Dunham, it’s not for her neuroses, size, or penchant for talking about her own experiences and insecurities ― it’s because she allegedly molested her sister (she did not) and is racially insensitive at best (this is not wrong). If we react callously to Kim Kardashian being reportedly bound, gagged, and robbed at gunpoint, it’s just because she totally faked it for attention or an insurance payout (we assume). Never mind the open glee with which many greeted the downfall or suffering of these celebrities, the joy at having an acceptable reason to trash them, often with very gendered language ― the critiques were certainly valid, but the vitriol spoke to something else.

Women in public aren’t yet equal. And if you were suffering under that delusion, ‘Trainwreck’ is particularly illuminating.
Hillary Clinton and even Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, imperfect politicians both, have been excellent targets for our collective misogynistic bile. Wasserman Schultz, who resigned in disgrace as head of the DNC after emails were leaked that suggested the organization had favored Clinton over the outsider Bernie Sanders, faced a hysterical backlash rooted in a long-time dislike amongst much of the party. While she’d doubtless drawn ire for certain political actions (see: her medical marijuana position, her support for the payday loan industry) and DNC choices (such as the odd primary debate schedule, believed to have favored the more well-known candidate), the feverish pitch was remarkable. She was booed offstage at the convention; critics have called her “Frizzilla,” “despised,” “an irritant” and slammed her as obsessed with her personal advancement. The last one might be particularly important. It grates on us that a woman might prioritize her own ambition. As Clinton herself has noted, her favorability ratings have dipped to shocking lows when she’s run for president, but when she’s been quietly, unobtrusively serving ― say, as Secretary of State ― we just love her.

We hate these women, often, all the more because they aligned themselves with feminism and then proved flawed. Through the Trainwreck lens, it’s obvious why there’s no mercy for female error. In an early chapter, Doyle traces how groundbreaking feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who had a highly unconventional and dramatic romantic history, was reduced to a crazy, unstable slut after her death ― a narrative that overshadowed her work so completely that the feminist movement itself screeched, temporarily, to a halt. “As Wollstonecraft went,” Doyle writes, “so went her cause.” And because her shaming had harmed the women’s rights movement, women resented her flaws the most: “[I]t was women, in fact, who increasingly drove the shaming of Wollstonecraft, in an effort to avoid being associated with her disgrace,” she argues. “The only way for a woman to engage in feminism at all, it turned out, was to actively participate in the shaming.”

Women, as Doyle states at the end of her book, have never had so much opportunity to speak out, and yet this doesn’t mean the book on trainwrecks has been closed. Simply being spoken of in public as a woman was once considered deeply shameful, but to this day, women who ask for our attention, our vote, our money ― women who have the gall to exist unabashedly in public ― make us unsettled. “Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles,” she writes in the preface ― and that hasn’t changed.

We hate these women, often, all the more because they aligned themselves with feminism and then proved flawed.
Perhaps the closest women can come to living in public without being torn apart by the public is <> ― an approach that, as Doyle shows with Spears, can catastrophically collapse. For now, Beyoncé exists mostly, to her fans, as an unobtainable artistic icon, not a woman who sits for interviews and goes clubbing. We have nothing to critique but her carefully crafted art, which no one can revile for being slutty, needy, try-hard, calculating or pathetic ― it’s her art. Elena Ferrante, the author of the smash-hit Neapolitan novels, hid her identity entirely, writing under a pseudonym to avoid her personal life becoming the public’s focus instead of her writing. We love them for not seeming to want anything from us, our attention or our affection. They’re just giving us their art and staying out of our way.

We’re vigilant, of course, for that illusion to shatter. It inevitably does, and both women have been under siege; Beyoncé has had her moments of mass critique and Elena Ferrante’s identity was recently revealed by a New York Review of Books report. When it does finally shatter, Trainwreck suggests, there’s rarely any warmth left for our once beloved women stars.

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Sady Doyle on the Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why
“That’s what I see her doing, <> so as not to be swallowed alive by it.”
By Heleo Editors Nov 9, 2016

Sady Doyle is a Brooklyn-based writer and speaker whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Awl, Buzzfeed, and more. Her most recent book, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear…and Why, considers cultural expectations for femininity and explores how women past and present have subverted these norms. She recently joined Heleo’s Editorial Director, Panio Gianopoulos, for a conversation on public breakdowns, Miley Cyrus’s career swings, and what robot sex could mean for our relationships.

Panio: Could you define the term “trainwreck?”

Sady: Well, it’s a complicated definition. The easy way to say it is that a trainwreck is a woman who has her narrative stolen. She becomes a public spectacle and a sort of culture villain, either for being sexually too much or emotionally too much, often both.

Panio: You make the distinction that it’s a woman. Why aren’t men trainwrecks?

Want more conversations with the world's great thinkers? Click the shiny blue button! Sady: I think that men have more leeway. We are more interested in policing women’s bodies and sexuality and inner lives. It’s not that there are no men that are culture villains, but they have to do a lot more, and it has to be a lot more violent. They’d have to be somebody like Chris Brown, for example, who got caught assaulting a girlfriend, or somebody like Mel Gibson, who got caught saying extremely racist and anti-Semitic things. Even then, that might not be enough.
Panio: I feel like even with what happened, Mel is still doing okay.

Sady: Right! He’s having a comeback tour. He’s on Stephen Colbert: “Oh, my silly foibles as a younger man.” They weren’t silly foibles. He was violent, you know? We have a lot more patience and tolerance for men than we do for women. With women, all they need to be is mildly abrasive, or self-destructive. Women don’t have to hurt anyone else.

Panio: You’ve speculated about the reasons behind this. There’s envy, there’s schadenfreude, there’s the just-world hypothesis (if we see something bad happen, we assume a person deserved it, because we can’t handle this idea that the world has no reason to it)… but ultimately, it seems to come down to misogyny.

Sady: Yes. I think that as long as women have been in public, there have been people very invested in policing the way they’re allowed to engage with the world. Being too outspoken, being too emotionally bare and therefore betraying that you have an inner life—you don’t just think about what the people around you feel, you feel things yourself—anything along those lines can be used against you, and to reduce you to a caricature.

Panio: Your take on Miley Cyrus was intriguing. You argue that she isn’t acting to provoke outrage—I think your phrase is “Her behavior is the only logical response to the outrage that’s always surrounded her.”

miley
“There’s now nothing Miley Cyrus has to hide from us. There’s nothing more we can take from her. We can’t steal images of her naked body, because she’s giving them away. That’s what I see her doing, leaning into the trainwreck so as not to be swallowed alive by it.”
Sady: I don’t want to say that Miley Cyrus has never done anything wrong. I think the charges of cultural appropriation and racism she’s faced are worthwhile, and especially as a white woman, I want to take that very seriously. But if it’s just about whether or not she has a right to sing about sex or do dirty dancing moves or wear a bikini, we have to consider that this woman—she’s not a woman, actually, she’s genderqueer—this person’s body was commodified from a very young age. Often really invasively. When she was 14 years old, a hacker leaked wet t-shirt pictures. She was the subject of an up-skirt when she was underage. She has always had predatory sexual attention focused on her, so for her to just be loud and out of control and naked is pretty much just giving the people what they want.

There’s now nothing Miley Cyrus has to hide from us. There’s nothing more we can take from her. We can’t steal images of her naked body, because she’s giving them away. That’s what I see her doing, leaning into the trainwreck so as not to be swallowed alive by it.

Panio: I do wonder how her experience, going from this Disney star with a squeaky clean, virginal, pure image—I think she even had a purity ring at some point?

Sady: Yes, she did.

Panio: And then transitioning into a sexually active adult, it’s almost like what every woman has to go through, but she does it in this giant, explosive, very public way.

Sady: Absolutely. Because Disney stars are so closely watched for any signs of sexuality, because they are policed more than many—they have a special school that young Disney stars go to to learn how to comport themselves in public—there’s a lot of stress placed on their private lives, especially for the young women. That’s what took down Vanessa Hudgens, who was a huge star. Somebody stole and posted her private nude photos, and she went into the oubliette for several years. She’s come back, and I’ve been happy to see her start to rebuild a career. For a while, it looked like that would be the end of her.

As for Miley, it was weird. There was so much attention on whether she was being inappropriately sexual that people interpreted everything she did as sexual. Once she gave a performance where she was wheeled across the stage on an ice cream cart, and she held onto the pole so she didn’t fall off, and that was seen as “Miley Cyrus pole dances.”

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Panio: That’s crazy.

Sady: We were so invested in this very young, underage performer’s sexuality under the guise of “No, she shouldn’t be sexual, and we shouldn’t be able to talk about it.” It was hypocritical and creepy.

Panio: It’s like perverted helicopter parenting as a nation.

Sady: Yes, yes.

Panio: I’ve read some interviews with Miley. She strikes me as intelligent and quite strategic about what she’s doing.

Sady: Right! She seems relatively grounded for having been raised in the zoo the way she was. I’m glad she’s found herself recently.

“It’s easy for the language of liberation to be appropriated and turned into just another way to tell women what they’re doing wrong, or what standard of moral purity they’ve fallen short of this week.”
Panio: You make the argument that it’s not just conservative finger-wagging. Sometimes this trainwreck commentary comes in a veil of pro-women, pro-girl righteousness.

Sady: In many cases, I think it’s a little opportunistic. When the Daily Mail calls Rihanna a whore, they’re not actually concerned about exploited sex workers or girls, they just want an excuse to call a black woman names for being sexual and for being visible. It is strange to me that sometimes, the way you’ll hear some feminists talk about Beyoncé and whether she’s “too sexy to be a feminist.” That is indistinguishable from men who really want to objectify Beyoncé and see her as just a body. It’s easy for the language of liberation to be appropriated and turned into just another way to tell women what they’re doing wrong, or what standard of moral purity they’ve fallen short of this week.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t need that language, and that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have high standards for our feminism. It does mean that we should be careful for the Trojan horse arguments, for the argument that comes in as a feminist argument and then very quickly turns into just another way to tear a woman down.

Panio: One of the nuances I’ve recently come across is that there are many different kinds of feminist viewpoints. There’s not just one unified, “This is what feminists think.”

Sady: That’s what I love about feminism. It is a big messy movement with a lot of different theories and viewpoints, and a lot of different arguments going on inside of it. I wouldn’t trust any movement that demanded absolute ideological conformity. Maybe I was just traumatized by going to youth group and singing the songs with everybody else. I really don’t like any movement that says, “Well, we do it this way, and this is the only way to do it, and you can’t ask questions.” I like that you can talk to five feminists, and they’ll have five wildly divergent opinions about a certain woman or a certain issue.

Panio: In your research, you go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, to these very early trainwrecks I’d never known about—for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose husband published her letters after her death and it became a scandal, and a lot of people thought it invalidated her argument [in A Vindication of the Rights of Women]. I was amazed at all these stories that you found beyond the ones I knew, like Sylvia Plath.

“Wollstonecraft, in particular, was a sexual radical. She didn’t believe in marriage. She was faced with these questions about female autonomy and sexuality and motherhood that women are still figuring out today.”
Sady: That was what I enjoyed most about the book: diving into these women’s lives. The story of Charlotte Brontë and Constantin Heger was one of the motivating factors for me to write Trainwreck. I found out about it in a book of 19th century literary criticism called The Madwoman in the Attic. It obliquely referenced that Charlotte Brontë had a relationship that went really terribly with a guy named Heger, and quoted one of the letters. I immediately wanted to find out everything I could about it.

I’d thought Brontë and Wollstonecraft were just these staid figures, but both women had intense, and sometimes intensely painful, lives. Wollstonecraft, in particular, was a sexual radical. She didn’t believe in marriage. She was faced with these questions about female autonomy and sexuality and motherhood that women are still figuring out today. I felt so thrilled when I was able to find these weird or ugly or embarrassing corners or their lives, and that these two had been shamed and taken apart, because it made them a lot more relevant to what younger women today face, where public shaming is so often used to tear women down and deprive them of their political voices.

Panio: And yet with social media, it’s very easy to think, “Oh, this is just happening right now. This is a result of technology.”

Sady: Right. There are a lot of thinkpieces and discussions that focus on harassment or public shaming as an internet problem. And yes, it makes sense to look at how the platforms work, and it is relevant that one of the reasons Twitter’s abuse problem is so bad is because they haven’t developed real safeguards for it.

But the internet is not a demonic force. The internet doesn’t possess you and force you to type death threats at some women because she works in video games. This is something we’ve been doing for a long time. We’ve just developed a lot of new technologies with which to do it over the years. If we did not have the internet to shame Zoe Quinn, we would be using a newspaper. It’s always been there. Dealing with it as a historical phenomenon allows us to see its deeper roots in gender and power, rather than just throwing up our hands and saying that the internet is terrible.

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Panio: When we look at representations of addiction or mental illness in men, it’s often seen as very glamorous, especially with artists—Kurt Cobain, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollack—and yet for women, there’s nothing glamorous about it, it just ruins their lives in the public image. What do you think is behind this?

kurt
“We can venerate men for being addicted or mentally ill because men are expected to be a little rough and raw and hard to deal with. A guy like Hunter S. Thompson or Kurt Cobain, who is able to break the rules, to be a volatile, unpredictable, on-the-edge person, that enhances his masculinity.”
Sady: We can venerate men for being addicted or mentally ill, in a way, because men are expected to be a little rough and raw and hard to deal with. A guy like Hunter S. Thompson or Kurt Cobain, who is able to break the rules, to be a volatile, unpredictable, on-the-edge person, that enhances his masculinity. Even being vulnerable, even having deep depression, that can make him seem deep.

For a woman who’s not meant to have any real inner life, who’s meant to have priorities that center around pleasing and taking care of others, mental illness can take away your ability to do those things. It can take away your ability to take care of others, because it takes away your ability to take care of yourself.

Addiction is the same way. For a woman to have those kinds of problems is a violation of femininity. It makes her a “bad woman.” Bad at being a woman. That’s when we really start to take her apart. If we were thinking about this from an even vaguely rational standpoint, we might conclude that she’s ill, she has a potentially deadly illness, and she does not need one more form of trauma in her life.

Panio: I’ve noticed this trend where there are a number of remarkable female comedians right now. Very smart, outspoken, and fearless. I wonder if somehow comedy gets a cultural pass. Or is it that comedy is sort of the avant garde; because you’re joking it gives you some time to get in there and shore up your position. I’m thinking about Amy Schumer or Sarah Silverman or, more recently, Samantha Bee, who are all out there just kicking ass.

Sady: I’m really happy about that. It feels like it was just a few years ago that we were still having the “are women funny?” talk. We were talking about whether women could even be comedians. Now there’s so many of them, you can pick and choose.

I think that comedy is, in some ways, a good safe space for discussions about being flawed or having sexual desire or sadness, because in comedy, that’s where we can talk about stuff that embarrasses us without necessarily feeling terrible about it. Half of the comedies in existence are about people behaving horribly. There’s one that I avoided when writing Trainwreck, but now have allowed myself to get into, called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Panio: I was going to ask you about that show.

Sady: It’s a great show, and she is definitely behaving in these highly stereotypical trainwreck-y ways, but because it’s a comedy, there’s a buffer. We’re allowed to watch people behave badly in a comedy without hating them. We are allowed to watch people do things that would make us cringe. We’re even allowed to deal with pain in comedy. I think Sarah Silverman deals with pain and sex and darkness a lot. Amy Schumer’s work I’m not as familiar with, but I hear people say that she confronts a lot of that in her work.

That gives me hope. Comedy is one of those art forms that relies, especially if you’re a stand up, almost exclusively on owning your narrative, and owning your own voice. I’m really pleased that that’s opening up a place for women to deal with their crap in public.

Panio: You write often about pop culture. I read your great piece on Westworld, about robots and sex and objectification. This is a speculative line of thinking—and maybe a little bizarre—but I’ve long worried about what human-robot sex would do to human relationships. While on the one hand, I feel like we’re moving towards a better society where there’s less objectification in relationships, at the same time, with technological advances, like the proliferation of easy access online porn, there’s talk about how it’s already changing people’s sexual experiences, because sex is becoming a la carte. You just get what you want.

You get that moment, and that’s it. There’s no entire experience around it. There’s no other person with you. Then I think about something like sex with a robot, and it takes that alienation even further. How do you have these other more complete relationships? What do we do when that becomes available? What if people just opt for the easy thing, and they’d always rather have the microwave dinner version of sex?

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Sady: This is something that’s fascinated me, too. It is true that one of the first questions we ask about any new technology is, “How can I fuck it?” We get the phone, we’re going to have phone sex five seconds later. There are futurists who are all in on the concept of not just human-to-robot sex but human-to-robot love. It’s a fantasy that a lot of people have, and they’re working on, “How can we build an AI that is boyfriend-like enough that you could conceivably confuse it for a boyfriend, at least a long distance boyfriend? How can we build a physical being that’s realistic enough that you would not feel like the world’s biggest loser having sex with it?”

robo
“I think people’s fascination with human-robot sex has more to do with the desire for a partner that exists entirely to fulfill you. She exists to do what you need. She doesn’t want anything else. She is programmed to give you exactly what you want.”
People are working on that, but at the same time, everything we know about these advances tells us that human-like AI is a long way in the future. If we had it in 20 years, it would be shocking. I think people’s fascination with human-robot sex has more to do with the desire—I’m going to be a little stereotypical and say that this is mostly a straight male desire—for a partner that exists entirely to fulfill you. She exists to do what you need. She doesn’t want anything else. She is programmed to give you exactly what you want. I think that that underlying desire, to remove the complications of having another human being in your relationship, is more interesting than whether we’re going to build a robot that I can date within my lifetime.

Panio: Right, though I do think it would drastically upset everything if you could automate the entire sexual drive. For there to be enough verisimilitude to satisfy our biology, because we seem very capable of being fooled.

Sady: Oh, definitely. I just find it unlikely that with the AI we have…I tried to train a chat bot once. If you’ve ever played with one of those on the internet, you know how it is. They just regurgitate half sentences. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with human conversation. I find it really hard to think that we’re going to get from chat bots or that virtual boyfriend game that people were downloading a year ago to a fake person that you cannot tell is fake. I think it’s more about the desire to leave real people out of it, to not have the vulnerability that goes along with making an actual human connection. Like, wouldn’t it be great if the next time a guy breaks your heart, you could just delete him forever. You’ve let me down for the last time!

As for Westworld, I think it’s most interesting as a metaphor: “How many people do we see every day that we’ve dehumanized and reduced to just a function, and how much pain do we cause thinking it’s not real because these people aren’t as real as we are?”

Panio: So what do we do about the trainwreck phenomenon? How do we make things better, besides not clicking on the link that says some horrible clickbaity celebrity garbage?

Sady: I think that these trainwreck stereotypes and archetypes have power because for a long time, men controlled pretty much everything about how women were spoken about or seen in the world. Women did not have the power to control their own narratives or their own stories, or tell the world the truth, unless they were very wealthy, very powerful, or very famous. Even then, they might be restrained.

Nowadays, we all have an unprecedented ability to be public. Being aware of the stereotypes and the patterns give us some position from which to resist them. I also think that if we just use our public voices to challenge the idea of what a good woman is, what a bad woman is, what women are at all, then gradually, we’re not going to be able to sort every women on earth into the very small “good girl” category, or the very bad and very big “bad girl” category.

Eventually, it’s just going to be us: a bunch of human beings who are neither super-humanly virtuous, nor sub-humanly corrupt and evil. We’re all just people. That’s what I’m interested in, whether we can use our public voices to create more space for women to be themselves.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

CREATIVITY
Sady Doyle’s Book ‘Trainwreck’ Examines The Cultural Obsession With Mocking Rebellious Women
January 23, 2017 at 11:00 am
trainwreck-book

Why do we fear a woman behaving badly? Why does it become such tabloid fodder to mock and demean those “crazy” women who rebel and color outside the lines, or even make mistakes? Have we even stopped to examine why we are so obsessed as a culture with vilifying women in a way we do not with men?

Sure, we’ve seen the likes of Charlie Sheen raked through the coals during a difficult time in his life and career, but multiple that ten-fold (or more!) and you start to get a glimpse into just how deep the sexist societal expectations thrust upon women are, and have been throughout history.

This is what author Sady Doyle explores in her book ‘Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… And Why?’. There are certain celebrity names that easily come to mind when you think “trainwreck”: Britney, Miley, Paris, Lindsay. But Sady’s book goes way back to women like Charlotte Bronte and Mary Wollstonecraft, examining how these high profile public women were put on a pedestal in a way that became their very downfall the minute they abhorred the cultural norms.

“By zeroing in on the messiest and most badly behaved women, and rejecting them we make a statement about what makes a woman good,” she writes in the book.

The “trainwreck” is essentially “the girl who breaks the rules of the game and gets punished, which means that she’s actually the best indication of which game we’re playing and what the rules are.”

lindsay-lohan

Sady talks about how the ideal woman is a social construct which is altogether very limiting as the definition is very narrow and leaves plenty of room for the “rebel” or “trainwreck’ to appear. We have also been socially conditioned, as men and women, to point fingers at the trainwreck and make sure she feels shame around the identity she occupies outside the norms. Added to this is the collective mockery that becomes entertainment or easy fodder for bystanders.

“It’s an easy shorthand for a woman whose suffering becomes a form of entertainment,” writes Sady.

In an interview with Vogue.com, Sady recalls how she first became fascinated with the phenomenon of the celebrity trainwreck around the time Britney Spears was having her public meltdowns. The dichotomy of her entering the public world as the perfect “good girl” virginal teen gave way to an adult who possessed entirely normal flaws, but those were exacerbated by the 24/7 media focus on her, and this was even before social media was around.

“It was fashionable to make fun of her for eating Cheetos, because she didn’t always wear makeup when she left the house, because she gained weight after having two children, which is a pretty normal time to gain weight. It was so interesting to me to see this ideal person get cast as utterly unlovable and villainous just for being flawed. We were sort of litigating womanhood itself, whether girls were allowed to grow up, were allowed to have flaws, through this woman who previously had been an almost unattainable ideal,” she tells Julia Felsenthal.

Through the evolving trainwreck narrative and phenomenon comes this horrible decoupling between a woman and her humanity, which then makes her an easy target who doesn’t have to weigh on our conscience too much.

britney-spears

“When we are bashing women for being too sexual, we’re not setting out to empower them. We’re reminding them that their sexuality primarily exists as something that should be on call for someone else, preferably a straight dude. When we bash women for being needy, or for being in pain, we’re not saying: be a strong, empowered woman. By litigating women’s ability to feel things like anger or sorrow, or simply the desire to be respected or loved by someone else, we’re reminding them again that their emotions are not useful and are not valid unless they’re the emotions someone else would like them to have,” explained Sady.

It also makes us as the onlookers conscious as to how we “should” be looking at this spectacle, as dictated by the norms around what constitutes a “trainwreck”.

“When a contemporary narrative takes over, it dehumanizes someone, makes it almost a social faux pas to see him or her through an empathetic lens,” she said.

Reaching back through history and writing about women like Mary Wollstonecraft became a clever tool for comparison in Sady’s book, because it dismantles the myth of iconic and historical women not being “as bad” as some of the more contemporary examples. When you compare the life of Mary to someone like Paris Hilton, as is in the book, all of a sudden we start to see they face similar pressures such as sexism, which then allows the reader to focus on the problem of the social pressure, instead of looking at the woman as the inherent problem.

Sady also says that by writing about certain public women, it enables people to empathize and even like them, where they wouldn’t have had the space to do so in any other typical media narratives. She uses Paris Hilton as well as Hillary Clinton, two women who have endured years of vitriol, mocking, and hatred. With the recent election and the kinds of narratives flung at Hillary for her every move (or cough!) compared to the disgusting things Donald Trump was able to get away with (racism, sexual assault, xen0phobia, stoking up hatred etc) it’s easy to see the media has a lot to answer for.