The examples were overexamined and low and behold they upheld her overall premise exactly to the letter. Actually, there was a dearth of examples to prove her points which led to over reliance upon the examples presented to demonstrate several points. But I found the book to be both too much and not enough. I have read some of her essays in other anthologies and I find her to be really smart, articulate, and insightful. And all these representations help cement a cultural narrative that encourages misogyny. We are rarely heroines, or even capable we are either bad or helpless. I appreciated the premise which is that women in general are portrayed in books, and movies and other media as evil monsters, villains, or victims. Demonizing women makes it less confusing to understand who should be in charge (aka patriarchy-preferably white). Doyle says that this is (as always) in service to the maintenance of the patriarchy. Doyle examines the allegories in mainstream consciousness through popular culture and finds that lots of it portrays women in not just negative, but monstrous and diabolical. One doesn't have to look very deeply to see that women are a perceived as the root of evil since humans began walking the earth. Sady Doyle takes aim at women in the narrative of women throughout the last 300 years. “Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.” -Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once 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. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. She illuminates the women who have shaped our Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, who starved herself to death to quell her demons author Mary Shelley, who dreamed her dead child back to life.

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. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. This “witty, engaging analysis” of female monsters in pop culture offers “provocative and incisive” commentary on society’s fear of female rage and power (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her )

Dead blondes and bad mothers