What We Can Learn From

Women Who Break the Rules

By SALAMISHAH TILLET SEPT. 20, 2016

TRAINWRECK
The Women We Love to Hate,
Mock, and Fear . . . and Why
By Sady Doyle
297 pp. Melville House. $25.99.

She’s a familiar spectacle. A former

Britney Spears Michelangelo Di Battista/Sony, via
RCA, via Getty Images
starlet struck down in her prime by a
D.U.I. arrest, a TMZ rant, or some
combination of both. Britney. Lindsay.
Amy. Superstars whose sullied
reputations appear salvageable only by
rehab, imprisonment or death.

A train wreck.

In her debut book, “Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and
Fear . . . and Why,” Sady Doyle, the founder of the blog Tiger Beatdown and a
staff writer at In These Times magazine, reclaims her. “She’s the girl who
breaks the rules of the game and gets punished, which means that she’s
actually the best indication of which game we’re playing, and what the rules
are,” Doyle writes in her preface.

As a result, the train wreck may also be one of society’s biggest hopes, who —
despite our self-proclaimed admiration for “strong women and selfless
activists and lean-inners,” as Doyle puts it — “might turn out to be the most
potent and perennial feminist icon of them all.”
In a culture that explains away similar (or worse) behavior by men, the train-
wreck phenomenon is amplified by new technologies in surveillance and
social media, which track the transgressions of public figures in real time and
replay them on endless loops. Yet Doyle is smart enough to know that the
seeming novelty of the train wreck only masks her timelessness: She is the
age-old “fallen woman” gone millennial.

Consider, as Doyle does, Mary

Wollstonecraft. Today, Wollstonecraft is
best known for writing “A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman,” her 1792 political
treatise advocating for the equal
treatment and education of men and
women in England. But after her death in
1797, her widowed husband, William
Godwin, published a colorful biography
that described Wollstonecraft’s two
suicide attempts; her affair with the
Lindsay Lohan Stephen Dunn/Getty Images American speculator Gilbert Imlay; and
the birth of their daughter, Fanny Imlay.
The posthumous revelation of Wollstonecraft’s premarital sex began her
downfall, rendering “Vindication” and its progressive gender politics suspect
for more than a century.

Trainwreck Sady Doyle

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After establishing that the proto-feminist Wollstonecraft was also our earliest
train wreck, Doyle then includes an array of women who fit into her category,
like Charlotte Brontë; Sylvia Plath; and Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist
author of “SCUM Manifesto,” who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. Doyle is most
expansive when she shows how other categories, like race, further restrict
women’s identity, with the consequence that women of color are even more
likely to be dismissed as train wrecks than their white ​counterparts.

In her treatment of Billie Holiday and Whitney Houston — two artists who,
after years of struggling with drug addiction, broken hearts and rumors about
their sexuality, died tragically — Doyle’s lineage is especially compelling.

But Doyle enters some shaky ground when she tries to

include Harriet Jacobs, the abolitionist and former
slave. Jacobs published her “Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl” under a pseudonym, in 1861, and Doyle
believes that Jacobs’s story itself was “wrecked” by
editors, fellow abolitionists and book publishers, who
questioned its credibility largely because of Jacobs’s
Mary Wollstonecraft Painting bydetailed account of being sexually harassed by her slave
John Opie/National Portrait
Gallery, London, via master, dismissing her narrative as fiction and putting it
DeAgostini/Getty Images out of print until the 1970s. But Jacobs’s literary
(detail)
disappearance was also emblematic of another
prejudice: For most of American history, it was the perspective of
slaveholders rather than enslaved ​African-Americans that historians treated
as a credible source. That changed only in the 1970s, with the publication of
books like John Blassingame’s “The Slave ​Community.”

Doyle is more persuasive on her book’s ultimate heroine, Britney Spears, the
quintessential good girl gone bad. With her shaved head, broken marriages
and fights with the paparazzi, Spears lost custody of her children, had a string
of uneven comeback performances and now, despite the success of her Las
Vegas run, remains under parental conservatorship. Unlike Doyle’s other
examples, Spears and her antics are usually seen less as a feminist apotheosis
and more like its antithesis, a warning sign to America’s daughters to avoid
the pitfalls that come with ambition and attention.

Yet this is exactly Doyle’s bigger point. The train wreck is “a signpost pointing
to what ‘wrong’ is, which boundaries we’re currently placing on femininity,
which stories we’ll allow women to have.” Spears’s career coincided with the
emergence of new media platforms that gave us round-the-clock access to
celebrity meltdowns. Young women now have even greater access to instant
fame. And because nearly every minute of their lives can be recorded, their
most mundane or traumatic moments are fodder for the world to endlessly
consume and condemn.

Doyle reminds us that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge women in terms of

degrading ​stereotypes or unrealistic expectations. “Women,” she writes, “are
not symbols of anything, other than themselves.”