Britney Spears became human to me in 2007. Until her very public breakdown that year, Britney had seemed like a robot built in a lab according to the exact specifications of the male gaze. She wasn’t for me. From the comfort of my feminist-populated women’s college in New England, I’d scoffed at Britney. And then, as I watched on a friend’s computer in our dorm as Britney shaved her head, clearly in crisis, I realized that “built in a lab according to the exact specifications of the male gaze” was a terrible standard to expect a human being to adhere to, and a tremendously unkind way to describe a real person.
This is the matter at hand in Sady Doyle’s new book Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why, out this month from Melville House, the independent press that singlehandedly reaffirmed the importance of small publishers when it published the Senate torture report at the end of 2014. That matters, because Trainwreck is a book I don’t think would necessarily have been picked up elsewhere. While a certain brand of lightweight feminism is currently popular with major publishing houses, it’s manifested largely in memoirs like Amy Schumer’s.
Trainwreck is not that. It’s a deeply researched account of our culture’s misogynistic obsession with trainwrecks—not the benign version pushed by Schumer, but women in the throes of public mental health crises (like Britney’s), public drug use and addiction (like Whitney Houston’s), and public—or publicly perceived—neediness (like Jennifer Aniston’s). These things might “add to a man’s mystique,” writes Doyle, but for women, they result in mean-spirited media narratives, nonstop scrutiny, short-circuited careers, and even death. A convincing, compulsively readable polemic, Trainwreck hinges on the argument that normalizing hatred toward famous women sets a precedent for hating any woman: If you build it, the trolls will come.