Dead Girls Quotes

“When a cop kills an unarmed man, it is because he senses his power being threatened by fear that he believes he should never have to feel. When a man kills his ex-girlfriend because she leaves him, he is saying the same thing: shame and sadness are feelings I should not have. Honor killings, as it turns out, are as American as apple pie.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Violent men’s grievances are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence: they are never the instigators; they are only righting what has been done to them. This shit-eating innocence is crucial to the fantasy of American masculinity, a bizarre collection of expectations and tropes “so paralytically infantile,” as James Baldwin writes in “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” “that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Our cultural obsession with murder stories and the criminal justice system is a prime example of the impulse to narrativize a reality that is basically unexplainable. For better or worse, narrative is the tool that the system uses to deliver justice: the defense and the prosecution each present their stories, and the one that makes more sense— read as: the more satisfying one— becomes the reality.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Father figures and male authorities hold a sinister interest in controlling girl bodies, and therefore in harming them.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again, but not enough to see a pattern. She is always singular, an anomaly, the juicy new mystery.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“For “decent” guys, comfortably vested with patriarchal authority, the nightmare is merely to be questioned, to no longer be the narrator of their own story. In Gone Girl, Flynn cracks open the American mainstream and lets Nick say one of our unsayable beliefs: that it is scarier for a man to be accused than to be killed.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“But it’s an understandable temptation for investigators to view criminals as mythic opponents, to create a theory of violence that looks at the gun, not at where it’s pointing. Because when you take away the monster, what are you left with?”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Serial killers and the investigators who look for them both exploit the bodies of vulnerable women.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Part of the problem is that mental illnesses are not primarily bad feelings, but the thought patterns and compulsions the sufferer develops to deal with them. These are difficult to let go of because, in a limited way, they work. Systems of magical thinking do provide reassurance, even if it takes torturous negotiations with one’s own brain to get there. I sort of agree with Freud that our mental dysfunctions are related to childhood shame, but rather than repressing shameful parts of ourselves, these dysfunctions help us protect them.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Eating disorders are a kind of penance and a kind of fortification and a kind of disguise. It is a paradox of womanhood that women have been so long associated with the private sphere, the home and the family, while our bodies are considered public property.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“He is the classic male victim. Even his misogyny is something that was done to him.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“learned that there were legions of hopeless women and they could be hurt and hidden so easily.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“It’s another case of destructive masculinity requiring both one’s self and one’s enemy to be larger than life.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“these stories— of Over Tumbled Graves, Robert Yates, Ruby Ridge, and all the other northwestern sociopaths— have one thing in common, every step of the way, it’s men. Men are the problem.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“The only way to grow up is to realize that the little tragedies that shock and devastate you are actually universal and inevitable. You are not going to learn that by listening to Taylor Swift or reading Joan Didion, not that I intend to stop doing either.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“This was truly stupid, confronting the universe’s randomness by doubling down on my belief that I was its protagonist. I compromised by allowing the story to be a tragedy.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“This spiritual equilibrium, a way of thinking much older than Christian ideas of darkness and light, produces all the twinning in these witch stories, women finding their equal and opposite halves: Denver and Sethe, Constance and Merricat.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“In the idealists’ eyes, the Los Angeles of today or yesterday is impermanent, indeterminate, and unimportant. It can always be torn down, rebuilt, and reimagined. I’m collecting examples of a certain L.A. yin-yang: disaster and development, “The Tragedy of Britney Spears” and Play It As It Lays, film language and dream language.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“These stories riff on what has always been sold as the American frontier’s most attractive and most terrifying quality: anything can happen.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“The real disease is that authorities prefer the banally evil Yates to the twenty-year-old gangbangers, the drug-addicted prostitutes. It’s like we’re back in an Old West settlement: with the prospectors, the robbers, the mountain men, the outlaws, the sheriff with his shiny badge, the judge far off in his courthouse. There are women at the brothel and the saloon, rumors of Indians hiding in the hills, but I’m not fooled. Even creekside with the earth folding itself into stark foothills, forest and mountain crags announcing the distance—even amid the anarchy, I know who’s in charge.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Randy Weaver and the FBI agents and U.S. marshals were eventually all Wild West outlaws. Serial killers and the investigators who look for them both exploit the bodies of vulnerable women.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“The Palouse is the middle of nowhere: a nowhere with quilted hills of wheat and soybeans stacking and cresting like the waves of the ocean. No one is watching, the uncanny countryside seems to say. Anything is possible.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Everyone knows the American West embodies the twin ideals of beauty and terror— the intersection of the awful and the awesome—”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“The white girl becomes the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr, particularly to that most unholy idol of narrative.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“our most basic myth would seem to be not Oedipus’s patricide, but matricide and violence against women. Where is Cinderella’s mother, and where is Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother? The philosopher Julia Kristeva has explained the drive toward matricide as a kind of original, generative anger, expressing a need to destroy the mother, the origin place, to become an individual self. This is messier than an Oedipal reading of history, as the will to matricide is born in confusion and creates only chaos. As Nelson explains, the maternal element returns “via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“The woods are shadowy, uncertain places, sympathetic to secrets, magic, transformations, and cruelty. Fairy tales are weird, distilled expressions of our inherited desires, and the Dead Girl Show, with its idyllic, uncanny small-town setting, is absolutely in the same tradition— it is no wonder that Sigmund Freud believed fairy tales could be interpreted like collective dreams.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Violent men’s grievances are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence: they are never the instigators; they are only righting what has been done to them. This shit-eating innocence is crucial to the fantasy of American masculinity, a bizarre collection of expectations and tropes “so paralytically infantile,”as James Baldwin writes in “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,”“that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“While men played at being outlaws with their guns, women played the parts given to them in order to survive.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture

“Like other writers before me, I have tried to make something about women from stories that were always and only about men.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture