Trainwreck by Sady Doyle

[elisi]

I've been listening to #Trainwreck by @sadydoyle all afternoon & my husband is asking me why I keep shouting "Down with the patriarchy!"

— Allison (@TheBookWheel) October 29, 2016

All I can really say is - buy this book & read it. It lays bare all the mechanisms beneath the surface, is painful and horrible and yes, makes you want to shout 'Down with the patriarchy!' A lot. Even as we see it unfolding all around us... It's a horribly prescient book, as Sady herself reflects in her latest post:

The Trainwreck Files: Hillary Clinton

And here she is, 10 months ago, writing about Hillary's 'likeability' and the impossible doublestandards any woman has to adhere to: Likable

It's not that anyone around here is blind to how the world works. But this book delves deeper than any other I've read. I literally can't recommend it enough.


Finally, thoughts on 'the patriarchy' by the way of quotes from books... I hope you can see what I'm trying to highlight.

“Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).”

“For of course we do not want to know our Friend’s affairs at all. Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. What have all these ‘unconcerning things, matters of fact’ to do with the real question, Do you see the same truth? In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections.”
C. S. Lewis on friendship from The Four Loves


'A man has a friend, period. He acquires this particular friend because they both like to hunt ducks. The fact that the friend discourses entirely in four letter words, very seldom washes, chews tobacco and spits at random, is drunk a good deal of the time and hates women, in no way affects the friendship. If the man notices these flaws in the perfection of his friend, he notices them casually as he does his friend's height, the colour of his eyes, the width of his shoulders; and the friendship continues at an even temperature for years and years and years.'
Betty MacDonald: The Egg and I


A dim recollection of something Wimsey had once said lit up the labyrinth of Harriet’s mind. Money. That was the connection between the two men. Mr. Arbuthnot, moron as he might be in other respects, had a flair for money. He knew what that mysterious commodity was going to do; it was the one thing he did know, and he only knew that by instinct. When things were preparing to go up or down, they rang a little warning bell in what Freddy Arbuthnot called his mind, and he acted on the warning without being able to explain why. Peter had money, and Freddy understood money; that must be the common interest and bond of mutual confidence that explained an otherwise inexplicable friendship.

She admired the strange nexus of interests that unites the male half of mankind into a close honeycomb of cells, each touching the other on one side only, and yet constituting a tough and closely adhering fabric.
Dorothy Sayers: Gaudy Night

I don't know that I have any conclusions. But these quotes all seem to be related.