Sady Doyle: Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers w/ Talia Lavin

Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction.

Maybe they are. And maybe that’s a good thing….

Sady Doyle, hailed as “smart, funny and fearless” by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula’s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, starving herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, dreaming her dead child back to life.

These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive.

Sady Doyle is an author, journalist and opinion writer. Her latest book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power is devoted to exploring monstrous images of women in pop culture, mythology and society, and the mechanisms of patriarchal control that exist to tamp down women’s fearsome potential. Her first book, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why was published by Melville House in 2016. She lives in upstate New York.

Talia Lavin is a writer based in Brooklyn, whose musings on food, faith and the far right have been featured in the New Yorker, the Washington Post and the New Republic. Her book about white nationalism online will be published by Hachette Books in 2020.

This event is free!