Patriarchy is a very specific patrilineal arrangement that begins on the intimate level with the idea that a man will appropriate a woman to himself and use that woman’s body to create children, who then go on to create his family life, his little mini-empire.
What’s the simplest way to explain the concept of patriarchy? And patriarchy is the best word we have so far for it. You’ve got people talking about the stigmatization of female sexuality.Īll of those things exist because of a particular structure and social order. You’ve got some people over here talking about gender identity and transphobia, and the ways that we impose a biologically essentialist binary on bodies that don’t obey those rules in life. You’ve got some people over here talking about rape culture. You’ve got some people over here talking about reproductive rights. When we talk about feminism, often it rewards a really specific angle. So I wanted to ground this in the idea that there’s a specific structure mandating all this violence. It’s not that big in terms of the amount of space it takes up or the amount of time it’s going to take you to read it, but it does kind of try to take you through a prototypical woman’s arc from puberty to old age while also trying to explain 20 th century horror. But the book definitely came out of that sense that we were up against a wall, and things had gotten incredibly ugly, and it did not any longer make sense to write a book about the arc of history bending towards justice it made sense to write about being lost in the dark.Ĭan you talk a little bit about this very granular idea of working through patriarchy, which forms the scaffolding for the entire book? It just came to seem to me that if we wanted to talk about what being a woman was, then it was maybe time to start digging into those darker feelings of powerlessness and helplessness and living inside an extremely stigmatized and vulnerable body, and that’s why, whenever I have to talk about this book, I have to talk about bodies.Īnd I don’t ever want to say that there is only one female body, there are so many different women and cis women and trans women both live in deeply stigmatized bodies. The #MeToo movement and the Harvey Weinstein story broke about two months after I started writing this book, but already there was a lot of darkness and trauma in the air that then exploded and became a huge part of the narrative around what being a woman was about.
With Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, I had just gotten married, I was pregnant, and while I was writing the book proposal, Trump won the presidency, and all of a sudden we were skidding into a narrative that was not about progress at all, that was very much about the fact that we were probably going to lose Roe v.
But it was written with this optimistic sense of “Well, maybe now it’s all finally over and women can just be themselves in public.” Those were the stakes at the time. And it’s a fairly dark book: it’s about mental illness and addiction and trauma and death, which my writings tend to be about. Trainwreck, my first book, is very much a product of the aughts feminist boom, and it is about media. It comes from the shift into a much darker and less optimistic version of gender politics that we were facing. And she never loses the central thread of how men relate to, and try to control, women, labeling them monsters when they resist, or when they remind them of their own worst selves. From “Psycho” and “Godzilla” to “Frankenstein,” “Carrie,” Donald Trump and the incel underground, Doyle weaves together a dizzying array of sources and arguments.
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