Through an impeccably researched analysis of both the film and its cultural impact worldwide, Doyle shows us how a single movie depicting the monstrosity of an adolescent girl actually produced a notable rise in Catholic exorcisms, from just “a handful into the thousands.” This is especially chilling when you consider that in so many cases, “exorcisms” were extreme religious rituals that led to a number of preventable deaths-including those of young girls suffering from seizure disorders, mental illness, or responses to sexual abuse or other trauma, and not the influence of “demonic” forces. What was fascinating for me, even as a non-horror movie buff, was Doyle’s analysis of the cultural impact of some of these representations of women as monsters, especially in The Exorcist. I can’t stand horror movies, and Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers helped me understand why. Most of us, by definition, are not exceptional.” She also points out that young women became the primary viewing audience of horror movies from the 1990s onward, since “the slasher film is not (just) an illicit way for teenage girls to satiate their rage, but a confrontation with the worst possible outcomes of their newly fledged sex lives it’s ritual catharsis, which exposes and acknowledges the vulnerability of female bodies in a male-dominated world. Since the “Final Girl” in a horror movie, like Neve Campbell in Scream, who “resists penetration both sexual and chainsaw related, who outwits and penetrates the killer in the end,” is the exception to the rule of how every other girl and woman is treated by the film, Doyle observes that “she can’t be our avatar. It feels like watching a little boy tear the head off his sister’s Barbie-like watching something valuable get destroyed just to prove a point.” She explores the tropes of horror movies by analyzing the gendered paradigm of the victims of heroes of movies like Psycho, The Mutilator, Halloween, Final Destination 3, and the Scream films, showing us the difference between the protagonist “Final Girl” who survives and all of the young girls who are murdered as victims in “leering, gratuitous topless shots the contemptuous, dim-bimbo characterization of the girls the camera’s focus on mutilated breasts and lacerated faces and melting, bubbling female skin. One of the most dangerous places a woman could possibly find herself is in a horror movie, and the most fatal casting is as “the dead blonde.” In particular, “slashers are the place where sex becomes death becomes sex, where a knife is never just a knife, and a two-foot iron hook is only a two-foot iron hook until someone gets creative,” Doyle writes. “For every heartless mermaid drowning her lover or deceptive siren luring him to crash on the rocks, there is a woman whose life has been stalled or limited or ended by a man.” By highlighting the dichotomy between our cultural fantasies of fear and the actual violence wrought upon women in retaliation, Doyle shows that an awareness of these origins can help women understand the dangers they face when operating outside of patriarchal norms. “For every imaginary femme fatale using her sexuality as a weapon of male destruction, there is a real woman who’s been raped by a boyfriend or groped by her boss,” Doyle writes. And yet, that fear of “sexualities that elude patriarchal control” is also what spurs men to violence against women in reality. The root of these imagined, monstrous versions of women, Doyle argues, is fear. In doing so, Doyle creates a powerful argument that the only way for women to take back their power is to shatter the monstrous versions of themselves created to constrain women at every life stage, as daughters and wives and mothers. Doyle offers a cultural road map for the way that patriarchal forces have turned women into monsters in our cultural imagination, from figures in Greek mythology like Helen of Troy and Circe to those in popular movies like Scream and The Craft. Instead, it charts the history of how women have been depicted by American culture as victims, sluts, witches, femme fatales, shrew-like wives, and bad mothers. I was wrong: Sady Doyle’s powerful work does more than celebrate female rage. So I picked up Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power thinking that it would be yet another book about women’s anger. This past year was the first in my lifetime in which I have seen the anger of women trending in popular media, and it’s a welcome surprise, with books out there to pave the way such as Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad, Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her, and Lilly Dancyger’s Burn It Down anthology.
Dare I say that 2019 is the year of righteous female anger? This year, I’ve observed that the power of women’s rage is finally taking center stage: two years after the resurgence of the #MeToo movement, people are talking about it, writing about it, reporting on it.
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