Trainwreck Quotes

“Enforcing silence is easy. All you have to do is make it feel like the safest option. You can, for example, make speaking as unpleasant as possible, by creating an anonymous social media account to flood women with virulent personal criticism, sexual harassment, and threats. You can talk over women, or talk down to them, until they begin to doubt that they have anything worthwhile to say. You can encourage men's speech, and ignore women's, so that women will get the message that they are taking up too much room, and contributing too little value. You can nitpick a woman's actual voice—the way she writes, her grammar, her tone, her register, her accent—until she honestly believes she's bad at talking, and spends more time trying to sound 'better' than thinking about what she wants to say.

And if a woman somehow makes it past all this, you can humiliate her anyway.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“If you stay at home, get married right away, never get a job, never display any unwelcome emotions, and stay away from the public eye to such an extent that you actually never make any sort of impression whatsoever, you can’t become a trainwreck. You become a miserable, sheltered woman living in a prison of her own making, but hey: At least no one’s going to disapprove.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“What is wrong with being too much? With being too big? With being openly sexual, openly emotional -- with having "no calmness or content except when the needs of [your] individual nature were satisfied," as Martineau wrote of Wollstonecraft -- or even with being openly unhappy?

Only this: Insisting on the needs of your individual nature, being unquiet and unhappy when those needs are not satisfied, requires that you have an individual nature to begin with. And it requires that you not be ashamed of it.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“The only big weapon anyone has against you is that you’re human. Fucked-up, a bit. Imperfect, yes. In this, you are like every great human who has ever lived, male and female alike. If you’re slutty, well, Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty slutty. If you’re needy, my God, Charlotte Brontë’s needs could devour a person alive. If you’re mean, or self-destructive, or crazy, I assure you, Billie Holiday managed to record ‘Strange Fruit’ while being spectacularly self-destructive, and Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel while being both crazy and very, very mean. The world is still better with those works in it. Humanity is still lucky that those particular women existed, and that, despite their deep flaws and abudance of raw humanity, they stood up and said what they had to say.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“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.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Yet the diagnoses don’t end them, or even really define them. Instead, their struggles elevate them, make them special: We all understand that genius and madness are connected. At least, we do when the genius is male.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“Women who have succeeded too well at becoming visible have always been penalized vigilantly and forcefully, and turned into spectacles.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Faced with an existential threat, we cared more about hating the right woman than we cared about our own safety.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“These women, with all their loudness and messiness, their public loneliness and weepy outbursts, their falling down and falling apart, are the image of our own vulnerable selves, the wild and agonized messes we all conceal beneath our hopefully acceptable personas.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“So, we may wreck people simply to validate ourselves. We may wreck them because we’re jealous. We may wreck them because we fear the sight of public suffering, or because, well, everyone else hates them, so they must have done something to deserve it. Maybe. But then, there’s my favorite theory: Maybe we wreck people because they’re women.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“And let’s be clear: The primary audience for celebrity blogs, tabloids, and reality TV shows is not straight men. Women are the ones who buy these stories. We’re the ones who enjoy them. We’re the ones these narratives are shaped for and aimed at. We’re the reason they exist. But what is it, exactly, that we’re enjoying?”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“And that ending, of course, is another beginning. After we’ve buried the trainwreck, and forgiven her everything, we have to deal with the sad fact that she can’t entertain us any more. The death of the trainwreck, and the orgy of public compassion that follows, is also just a very loud, noisy process of denial and distraction that takes place while the media trains its sights on the next lucky girl.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“To forgive the dead, to immortalize the dead, is not forgiveness. It’s one more sign of how impossible forgiveness is”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“Even if you do convince yourself to speak, someone else has to agree to listen to you. If they deny you, silence comes back. And it will swallow you whole.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Women are not symbols of superhuman virtue. Women are not symbols of all that is disgusting and corrupt. Women, it turns out, are not symbols of anything, other than themselves.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Women hate trainwrecks to the extent that we hate ourselves. We love them to the extent that we want our own flaws and failings to be loved.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“We have to assume that misfortune proceeds from personal flaw. Any other explanation is just too frightening.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“After two centuries of feminist progress and increasing female agency, the journey that started with Mary Wollstonecraft and seemed to proceed through to Hillary Clinton wound up with Britney: a reminder that no matter how rich, or important, or powerful she was, no matter how “good” or how beautiful she seemed, even the perfect girl would get drunk one day, or lose a boyfriend, or gain weight, or age, or get sad, or get sick. And when she did, we would be there. Ready and waiting to take her down.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“our gruesome appetite to see women suffer, or to see them punished for violating our ideas of how women “ought” to behave—”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“Mental illness and addiction ruin women—make them sideshows, dirty jokes, bogeymen, objects of moral panic—but they seem to add to a man’s mystique.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why

“Harriet Jacobs was possibly one of the bravest women who ever lived. [...] She was scared, but she did it. That's all being strong is, apparently: being scared, or flawed, or weak, or capable (under the right circumstances) of astonishing acts of stupidity. And then going out and doing it all anyway. Trying, every morning, to be the woman you want to be, regardless of how often you manage to fall short of your own high expectations.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else: Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success had done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man's game before she showed up. Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj's press coverage, outside of the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for "sins" that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“I doubt it's a strictly factual account, but these attitudes are deeply imbedded.
Which means that our only hope of changing them, of ending the wrecks, lies not in stopping or even changing the Internet -- even with the best blocking functions, report-abuse functions, real-name transparency protocols, and twenty-four-hour moderation in the world, hate (to quite Jurassic Park) finds a way -- but in changing ourselves, and our definitions of womanhood. We have to stop believing that when a woman does something we don't like, we are qualified and entitled to punish her, violate her, or ruin her life. We have to change our ideas of what a "good" woman, or a "likable" woman, or simply a "woman who can leave her house without fearing for her life because she is a woman," can be.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Consider this book, then, a feminist anatomy of the trainwreck. It's an effort to figure out who she is: why she's making us so angry; what, in general, she hath done to offend us. These are questions of more immediate and personal relevance than you may think: When women look hard enough at the trainwreck, we almost invariably end up looking at ourselves.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Trainwrecks, as public figures, are necessarily also myths. But they’re the villains of the story; they’re our monsters and demons, images of what we fear, and who we fear becoming. I hated Britney early on, because I hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing; I wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied, and I wound up rejecting her.

But every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject; the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent. In Britney’s case, she represented the end of youth, and the corruption of purity: She was the pretty, good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up, the “Queen of Teen” who was used- up and over-the-hill by age twenty-five. She was the Wages of Feminism, the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk. She was the cost of public life, for women.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“But maybe we should give Theroigne the last word here. God knows, she’s had to wait for it. “If we wish to preserve our liberty,” Theroigne said, “we must be prepared to do the most sublime things.” The first item on that list, and the greatest liberty you can claim, lies in deciding that you—human, fuck-up, mess, trainwreck that you are—may well be capable of the sublime.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“the only big secret that all that ridicule can reveal—the only big weapon anyone has against you—is that you’re human. Fucked-up, a bit. Imperfect, yes. In this, you are like every great human who has ever lived, male and female alike. If you’re slutty, well, Mary Wollstonecraft was pretty slutty. If you’re needy, my God, Charlotte Brontë’s needs could devour a person alive. If you’re mean, or self-destructive, or crazy, I assure you, Billie Holiday managed to record “Strange Fruit” while being spectacularly self-destructive, and Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel while being both crazy and very, very mean. The world is still better with those works in it. Humanity is still lucky that those particular women existed, and that, despite their deep flaws and abundance of raw humanity, they stood up and said what they had to say.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“We have been punishing women for doing public life “the wrong way” for as long as women have had public lives. And, as women have pushed ever more inexorably into the public sphere [...] we have developed ever more technologies and means by which to insult them. This may make entering the public sphere dangerous, and painful. But it is, perhaps, less painful to be punished for what you do than to punish yourself by never doing anything at all.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“Feminine ideals are a strange business. They seem to have been constructed, for most of history, to rule out pretty much every living woman. And “strong feminist woman,” though it’s managed to kick the can a few yards down the road—now you don’t just have to be literally perfect at all of your relationships; you also get a job, and it turns out you need to be perfect at that, too—can, all too easily, turn into yet another trap. Applied the right way, it can allow us to applaud each other for what we do manage to get right. Applied in the age of trainwrecks, it can become yet another mile-high yardstick, against which women measure themselves and each other, and invariably come up short.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why