Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, December 9, 2016

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 224 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.  With me today is Elyse, and we are going to talk about Doctor Strange, heroine rage, and true crime in a podcast that I had called, internally on my hard drive, “Earl Had to Die.”  We are going to talk at length about why Elyse was mad at Doctor Strange – the movie, not the person; we don’t know him personally – what we liked and what we didn’t like about the film.  Please be advised that it’s a very spoiler-y episode, so if you haven’t seen the film and you’re going to see it, you might want to skip this until afterward.  We also discuss in depth the concept of female rage, all of the books with “Girl” in the title, heroine revenge, female rage horror stories, and supremely pissed-off heroines in romance.  We also talk about true crime, and there’s some dog interruption, which I know all of you really enjoy.

Now, because this episode talks extensively about the endings of movies and books and TV shows, it’s pretty spoiler-y, like I said.  Alas, it’s kind of impossible to talk about vindication and catharsis without discussing the endings that make that happen.  Also, I want to make sure that you’re aware that we mention several times in the course of the episode rape, the criminal justice system and the way in which it fails rape victims, so trigger warning:  please be advised.

And, one more thing:  after the outro, which is totally a word, we have a rather inappropriate outtake, and listener discretion is also advised.

This podcast is sponsored by Elizabeth Hoyt, the New York Times bestselling author of the Maiden Lane series.  Duke of Pleasure, her latest Maiden Lane adventure, features Alf, the new Ghost of St. Giles and a female swashbuckling vigilante, and Hugh Fitzroy, the Duke of Kyle, a stern ex-soldier tasked with bringing down an evil group of aristocrats with Alf’s help.  This is a romance that has it all:  sword fighting, sexytimes, pants feelings, danger, passion, intrigue, and a heroine that totally kicks ass.  If you’re new to the series, you can trust Smart Bitches reviewer Elyse – the same Elyse who’s on this podcast! – who says, “You don’t have to read the Maiden Lane books in order, but they’re so much fun you might as well.  Your credit card might hate me, but you won’t.”  You can start binge reading today.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater.  I’ll have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is.

And I want to invite you to check out two cool things:  one, we have an iTunes page at iTunes.com/DBSA, so if you’re an iTunes kind of person, that is all for you.  And if you would like to help support the show and keep it awesome, I invite you to have a look at our Patreon page at patreon.com/SmartBitches.  For a dollar a month, you can help keep the show going, and every contribution that you have made is enormously appreciated, so thank you very much for listening, for being here, for looking at the Patreon page, for coming back, for emailing me – it’s all awesome!

And now, without any further delay, on with the meandering, thoroughly inappropriate, rage-filled podcast.

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Sarah:  So tell me, what did you thing of Doctor Strange?

Elyse:  Fuck, man.  I was so mad at that movie.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I had the most interesting conversation with my husband, ‘cause we were talking about this last night.  Adam is fascinated by the Marble, Marvel universe.  He loves all things that, with interconnected stories and Easter eggs and references, and he’s totally into, I think he’s read, like, nine hours of the Wikipedia at least?

Elyse:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And it’s, it’s his most recent favorite deep dive into nerdery.  Like, when he works out in the morning, he, he’s been watching Agents of Shield, and now he’s watching Daredevil, and then he’s going to move on to the other series – [laughs] – and it’s to the point where if I’m working out in the room, I have headphones on, and I couldn’t turn up the volume anymore, but I could still hear people dying and shit blowing up on Agents of Shield because he has the volume turned up so loud, so now he has his own Bluetooth headphones to connect to the television because I was like, listen, I cannot work out with people screaming and dying and then shit blowing up, like, every five minutes.  I’m trying to de-stress, not add to my stress.

Elyse:  I will –

Sarah:  And I’m like, if you’re going to start watching Jessica Jones, I cannot do that.

Elyse:  I will say, though, that Agents of Shield has the best nerd romance ever.  It’s worth –

Sarah:  It is so nice.

Elyse:  It is, it is worth watching just for the FitzSimmons romance arc.  I will throw that right out there.

Sarah:  It’s like they planned the fan ‘shipping name when they created them.

Elyse:  Right, they knew what – yeah.  They knew.  They knew.  So, no, Doctor Strange.  Well, first of all, I mean, I think I didn’t like it as a movie in general because I felt like it was Iron Man with magic?  And –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  – I bought that ticket already.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  You know, super arrogant genius suddenly has physical impairment that could threaten his life or career or whatever and finds “magic.”  I, I think the thing that really bothered me was that there’s this message about disability in the movie that troubles me, because the premise of the, the story of Doctor Strange is that he gets into a, a car accident and then his hands are so severely damaged he can’t perform surgery anymore, and he’s this world-famous neurosurgeon, and he’s very wealthy and successful and arrogant, and so he has a complete crisis because he can’t perform surgery because his hands don’t work, right?

Sarah:  Right.

Elyse:  And then he hears of a guy who had basically, like, a severed spinal column and still managed to walk again, and the guy managed to walk again because he went to this temple in Tibet and learned magic, and so that’s how Doctor Strange becomes a sorcerer, and – I don’t know, I felt like there was kind of an overarching message of, like, you should exhaust all options financially, emotionally, whatever, to make your body whole again?

Sarah:  Right, the only valid is no paralysis, no nerve damage, you must be restored to perfection.

Elyse:  I mean, I guess you could argue that, because in the movie he never really – he, he is, he doesn’t get his hands back, right.  He just learns how to magic in spite of it, but – and we’re spoiling the shit out of this for everyone – there’s a scene at the end of the movie where the bad guy takes away the magic that allows Pangborn to walk again and makes him paralyzed again, and it’s supposed to be a powerful scene because this character who’s supposed to be a good guy you’re finding out is a villain, and so they’re saying the absolute worst thing you can do, the most villainous act you can do, is to take away this man’s mobility and to make him disabled, and that was really upsetting to me, and I thought, you know, if I was – as an adult I can look at this and say, someone didn’t think about this, and it’s kind of fucked up, but if I was a kid in a wheelchair, man, and I watched that movie, I would have been fucking devastated!

Sarah:  Right.  Like, the only hope is magic that doesn’t exist.  Sorry!

Elyse:  Right.  I –

Sarah:  Hold on.  Are you saying that in the construction of a Marvel movie, someone didn’t think through the process of a storyline or character?  No!

Elyse:  Yeah.  Pretty fucking shocking, right?

Sarah:  I know, yep.  Well, damn!  My new favorite expression of shock is, shave my head and call me Celtic.

Elyse:  [Laughs] Yeah, I mean, there, there was that whole huge issue, too.  The movie had a lot of issues.  It really did.

Sarah:  I thought it was all hat and no cattle.  Like, here are some really rad special effects!  We summoned the programming from Inception ‘cause no one was using it, and we bent the screen and did all this cool shit with, like, buildings and – just watching the pieces of architecture fly around and watching the, the rood screen and the, and the area where the choir sits fall like dominos in a repeating pattern, like, that was pretty cool!

Elyse:  Oh, yeah, visually, it’s a really –

Sarah:  Yeah!

Elyse:  – cool movie.

Sarah:  It’s beautiful.  It just falls apart when you think about the story too much.

Elyse:  But even, I don’t think it did a great job of worldbuilding.  Like, I was telling my husband at dinner yesterday, we were talking about it, I didn’t feel like I really got a good understanding of the foundation of how magic works in that world, right.  Like, they’re making these kind of sparkler shapes, but what do they do?  What’s the –  I mean, there’s the big circle that lets you teleport, basically, and then kind of a whip thing, and then I didn’t know what –

Sarah:  Yes, but not without your magic ring.  You’ve got to have your magic secret spy decoder ring in order to make the sparkly circle so you can jump through space.

Elyse:  No.  I, I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening.

Sarah:  [Laughs] I can’t imagine why not.

Elyse:  Right.  Like, they didn’t, they didn’t do a – when you have a, when you have a world that uses magic or uses the supernatural, you have to spend an awful lot of time worldbuilding to establish what the rules for that world are so that it makes sense, and they did not do that in this movie.

Sarah:  Not only that, but they had a character whose initial resistance to the entire idea, aside from his own arrogance and hubris and self-entitlement and general douchebaggery, was that he was a, he was a neuroscientist, so he deeply understood the scientific connectivity of pieces of biology, like nerves, like immense things like that, so there’s no real massive struggle for him.  He’s just like, oh, okay, this is out, I got the shit scared out of me by Tilda Swinton, so I’m going to just accept this.  And if you take – oh, my God, course he’s barking! – if you’re going to take a person who’s so grounded in science and stick them in a world full of magic, it would make sense to me to at least in some way connect what he’s doing to science.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  But he was just like, oh, okay, in order to, in order to, to progress, in order to get what I want, I have to surrender my worldview and accept yours, which, okay, that really doesn’t accomplish anything, because neither of those worldviews were either fully explained or valid.

Elyse:  I think the other thing that really bothered me was that I didn’t buy this whole complete and total crisis because suddenly his hands shook and he couldn’t do surgery, because they say right in the beginning of the movie that he is on the cutting edge of research into neuroscience, and there are a lot of doctors who get those accolades and who make speeches and who are really respected in their community who don’t cut anyone open, so I think that they made him out to be kind of this genius in his field, but it, it didn’t really hold water that he has to do surgery to continue the work that makes him the genius in his field, if that makes sense.

Sarah:  Yep!  Sure does!

Elyse:  You know, I mean, there are a lot of –

Sarah:  He, he had a photographic memory; that was pretty special.

Elyse:  Right!  I mean – [sighs] – yeah.

Sarah:  My biggest problem, as I was ranting to my husband last night while we walked the dogs, was that, as usual, the women exist in weird supportive, non-major roles.  There are two women in this movie who have speaking lines, two.  The only other women in the film are sidekicks to Hannibal, the bad guy, and Hannibal –

Elyse:  Who my aunt thought was Jimmy, played by Jimmy Smits, by the way, just so everyone knows.  Jimmy Smits and Mads Mikkelsen are not the same person.

Sarah:  They’re very different!

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Very different.  So Hannibal is running around with really funky eye makeup and has a bunch of sidekicks, and some of them are women, but they grunt, and they moan, and they make fighting noises.  Those don’t count as speaking lines.  So there’re women who are nefarious sidekicks, there’s Dr. Palmer, who’s played by McAdams –

Elyse:  Oh!

Sarah:  – Amy McAdams?  Rachel McAdams!  Amy, Rachel, Jennifer, Sarah –

Elyse:  The, the –

Sarah:  – Rachel McAdams!

Elyse:  She was, she was in the, the, the Nicholas Sparks thing.

Sarah:  Yeah!  Rachel McAdams.  She’s, she’s an ER doctor, which is staggeringly di-, devoid of people of color, just, like, have you been in an ER?  Have you seen who works there?  It’s not just white people!  And she exists with perfect makeup to fix him.  There’s never any explanation why she can see things that other people can’t see, and there’s never any explanation why her entire life is either patching him up, supporting him, or being at the hospital.  She’s entirely existent as a, as a prop.  She is a flying buttress to his, to his story.  And then there’s, you know Tilda Swinton, who is allegedly Celtic.

Elyse:  Celtic, right.

Sarah:  And, uh, wise and –

Elyse:  What do you mean, allegedly, Sarah?  She’s totally Celtic!

Sarah:  Oh, okay.

Elyse:  She’s the most Celtic ever.

Sarah:  [Laughs] She’s very interesting to look at and watch, and whenever she was on the screen I was like, you are just so interesting!  But –

Elyse:  I think that –

Sarah:  – that, those are the only women with speaking roles!  Rachel McAdams and Tilda Swinton, they’re, and the only, and there’re no women in this whole place in Tibet, there is, there are no other women training with, with Hannibal and Celtic Tilda.  Like, there’re no other women?  None.  Zero?  That’s it?

Elyse:  I think I remember seeing one, ‘cause I really liked her belt, but –

Sarah:  [Laughs] Well, she didn’t have any lines!

Elyse:  No.

Sarah:  She wasn’t crucial or anything.

Elyse:  I, I will say this:  Marvel TV has done a much, much better job giving women interesting and meaningful roles than the Marvel movies.  The Marvel movies have just really sucked at that, but Agents of Shield, Luke Cage, not so much Daredevil, definitely Jessica Jones, they’ve done a really phenomenal job, but the movies are, really, they’re sucking in that, that area.  I mean, if you watch Luke Cage, holy shit, we’ve got lots of women of color!  With important –

Sarah:  Yep!

Elyse:  – in speaking roles that, you know, drive the story forward.

Sarah:  Wait, they talk?

Elyse:  They talk!

Sarah:  Whoa!

Elyse:  And they have agency, and they’re important!

Sarah:  Ohhh, wow!  What’s that like?

Elyse:  I know!

Sarah:  Yeah.

Elyse:  They’re things like police detectives –

Sarah:  D’oh?!

Elyse:  – city, city councilwomen –

Sarah:  Wait, wait, wait, is it going to be like Sleepy Hollow and they’re all going to die?  I hope not.

Elyse:  No.

Sarah:  That would suck.  See, this is what I was saying to Adam and why I was so irritated:  you know, I, I have a very limited amount of energy to spend on my entertainment, and I have a very limited amount of energy to spend figuring out what I want to do with my entertainment.  I already mistrust television writers because I am a romance fan.  I read for the end.  I like to know the end is there.  I like to know that I’m in the hands of someone who knows where the story is going to go, and I think that nine times out of ten, unless it is a very specific number of episodes that the whole season has dropped already or that there is a finite point, there’s an endpoint in mind, I don’t necessarily trust TV writers because they don’t want the end, they want syndication forever and ever, amen.  They want, like, you know, a big-ass cake that says Happy 500 Episodes, because that’s where the money comes.  I get it!  I totally get it, but I don’t trust them as a result.  And because I read novels I have lots and lots of things to read.  When it comes to movies I’m picky, ‘cause that shit is expensive!  I have kids, they eat popcorn, and popcorn is, like, more expensive than sterling silver right now, so I have a very limited amount of patience and money for movies, and I don’t have any time or energy for an enterprise and a franchise that’s going to continuously disrespect my intelligence and, you know, my whole gender.

Elyse:  I –

Sarah:  Like, I’m not here for it.  I don’t have time for it.  I’m –

Elyse:  I –

Sarah:  I – yeah.

Elyse:  I would tell you that you need to watch both Luke Cage and Jessica Jones, and there is absolutely closure there.  I mean, It’s clear that they keep it open that we can come back to this if we want to, but the, the story arc finishes, we’re done, and I think you would be surprised and pleased.

Sarah:  Well, I know that I can’t, ‘cause I would never sleep again –

Elyse:  Oh, okay.

Sarah:  – but those are my, those are my exceptions, because if it’s a show on Netflix, they generally drop the whole thing at once, right?

Elyse:  Yes.  Yeah.

Sarah:  There’s a, there’s a, and there’s an endpoint encouraging you to binge with an, with a destination in mind, so that I, that I don’t struggle with at all!  Like, I am totally on board with this idea, but the Marvel movie franchises are going to have to work a lot harder for me to be like, yes, opening weekend, full-price movie tickets, let’s do this!  Because I got better things to do with my energy than to be constantly told that I as a whole, you know, gender, fifty-odd percent of the population, am not important and not, not worth putting in major roles.  [Laughs] Of course, right before we saw Doctor Strange we saw a preview for that movie with Matt Damon where he saves everyone in China or something from dinosaurs?

Elyse:  Oh, my God.  Between that and the Ghost in the Shell –

Sarah:  Oh, Jesus, God Almighty.  I –

Elyse:  The, the yellowface is just, like, it makes my stomach hurt.

Sarah:  Yeah, that’s exactly it.  It makes my stomach hurt.  Ugghhh.  Anyway.

Elyse:  I will –

Sarah:  So speaking of – go ahead.

Elyse:  – of stomach hurting.  I will say, however, that I would listen to Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton narrate anything?

Sarah:  I want to know if his mouth hurts from doing an American accent.  Like –

Elyse:  He sounded exactly like Hugh Laurie when Hugh Laurie does an American accent.

Sarah:  It’s like they do the same one, right?  There’s, like, this standard –

Elyse:  They do the same one.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.

Elyse:  Hang on, let me look at my Audible account, because I swear to God, Benedict Cumberbatch narrated a Jane Austen novel, and it was free on Audible, and I have it?

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, Rosamund Pike also, she narrated Pride and Prejudice, and it’s glorious.  Oh, it’s so good.

Elyse:  I’ll have to find which one he did.  I think it was maybe Mansfield Park?  But, yeah, it was really lovely.  ‘Cause he does have a, he does have a good narrating voice.  That’s what you should do, Benedict.  I know you think that you’re a big movie star now, but just, if you could just read audiobooks, we would appreciate that.

Sarah:  I have to say, I like the comic relief of the cape?

Elyse:  The cape was the best character in that whole fucking movie.

Sarah:  I would watch an entire show just about the cape.

Elyse:  Just the, the cape getting shit done.

Sarah:  Yep.

Elyse:  Solving some crime.

Sarah:  Yep.  And the cape knew better, and it was the only thing that knew better that got him to shut up and listen consistently.

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  Because even though, you know, Tilda Swinton and everyone else in the, in the Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi magic house, they all told him, and he was like, yeah, I, I know better.  You know, I’m just going to eat my apple in the library after hours and stir some trouble and do some shit!  The, the cape tells him to do it, he sits down and he shuts up!  [Laughs] It’s great!  I bet the, maybe the cape is a girl.  If the cape is a girl and it doesn’t have a mouth, the, the degree of agency, does it, that it had, if the cape was a girl, would that be a speaking role?

Elyse:  [Sighs] I don’t know, ‘cause he wears the cape.  There’s –

Sarah:  That’s true!  It’s an accessory.  Still, mm.  It’s really sad where I am so desperate for better representation that I’m willing to assign gender to clothing.

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  That is really sad, Marvel.

Elyse:  So, rage.

Sarah:  Let’s talk about rage.

Elyse:  Let’s.

Sarah:  Yes, ‘cause we already have some regarding Marvel.  Let’s apply it to books too!

Elyse:  I feel like I have kind of rage about everything right now.

Sarah:  I love the focus on all of these books that have “Girl” in the title and the thrillers that you read in review that center on a female protagonist who is in some way being manipulated or gaslit or is considered under that lovely vague umbrella term “unreliable,” and I’m beginning to wonder how often unreliable female narrators are actually narrators who are female who don’t fit into the prescribed box of adult female.  You know, like operating with agency and being in control of her own vagina and what she does with it?  But anyway.  The more you have these females who are centerpiece of stories that involve their own vulnerability and then reclaiming their strength, I wonder if the pro-, the popularity of those books is coming out of the fact that a lot of women right now are really fucking pissed.

Elyse:  Oh –

Sarah:  And tired of a lot of shit.

Elyse:  – absolutely.  I mean, I, you know, I don’t think that you can point solely to the election cycle and say this is why, because obviously publishing takes time, and so –

Sarah:  No, not just the election.

Elyse:  – it, I think that for the past few years there’s been kind of a lot of, of rage around how women are being treated in media, how women are being treated in the criminal justice system.  I’m thinking specifically of the Stanford rape case, and I think that’s why these books are so popular is because I think as women we don’t have as much trust for the larger systems at play that they’re going to act in our benefit, which is why a lot of times in these books I think that, that there is a lot of rage and a lot of distrust of things like the criminal justice system, the political system.  I mean, how long have we been talking about our reproductive rights and whether we can see the doctors we want to see and –

Sarah:  Get the birth control that we would like to have.

Elyse:  Right.  And I –

Sarah:  Control our menstrual cycles.

Elyse:  Right, and I think we’ve just hit this point of, I’m fucking done with it.

Sarah:  Especially in the books that you read, which I cannot read ‘cause they would scare the shit out of me, much like Jessica Jones, there’s a sense that in a lot of these cases in these books, the women realize a great injustice has been done, the established system of law and order is not going to believe me, or it’s not going to do, it’s not going to do right by me, so I’m going to take justice into my own hands, and a lot of the time they get away with it.

Elyse:  Right, and I think that’s, part of the satisfaction is there’s absolute closure at the end of those thrillers, where it used to be that at the end of a thriller starring a, a female heroine, you know, she was in jeopardy at the very end, but something happened, some external force showed up, the police or someone, to save her, right, and typically the bad guy got arrested, or if he was killed, it wasn’t by her, and now, I think, there’s even such distrust over, okay, well, this guy killed a bunch of women, but I’m the only one who really knows about it, you know.  Is he going to get off after five years in prison and then go back to killing women?  That, there’s a much more satisfying closure by having her, like, stab him to death, right?

Sarah:  So, the, the, the TL;DR –

Elyse:  There’s a finality there.

Sarah:  [Laughs] The TL;DR is, well, Earl had to die.

Elyse:  Exactly.

Sarah:  She got all kinds of Dixie Chicks on his ass.

Elyse:  Like, there was a – and again, I’m spoiling the end, so I apologize, but, like, with The Girl on the Train, I felt like the movie kind of veered away from the book.  At the end of the book you get this impression, or at least I did, that Tom, who’s the bad guy, he’s so manipulative and so cold and so good at it that you get the impression, like, I think he’s killed people before, specifically women.  Like, I, in the movie they made it this kind of moment of passion or rage where he kills her suddenly and then immediately freaks out, but in the book it’s not like that at all.  You get the feeling this is very premeditated.  He’s too good at this for this to be the first time he’s killed somebody, and there’s this moment where Anna and Rachel kind of look at each other, and they’re like, we have to fucking kill this guy.  Like, that is –

Sarah:  Well, he’s going to get away with it.

Elyse:  So we’re – and, and he’s going to, this is not the first time this has happened; it won’t be the last time; let’s stab him in the neck.  Like, that’s – and that was really satisfying.

Sarah:  Yep.  The other thing that’s interesting about that level of satisfaction is that if the woman is fully in control of what she’s doing, it’s incredibly cathartic, because you were reviewing a book and you didn’t want to spoil the ending, where the heroine is in this sort of –

Elyse:  She goes into, like, a fugue state.

Sarah:  Yeah, I was going to say, she’s in, like, a fugue state, and she kills the person who didn’t actually do all of the bad things, just did some of the bad things, and wasn’t aware of herself while she did it, and you found that really unsatisfying.

Elyse:  Right.  I mean, first of all, she, in my opinion, killed the wrong person, and second of all, the, the satisfaction, I think, of these books is that the heroine is fully engaged in kind of like this vigilante justice.  She knows what she’s doing, and it’s still the right choice morally, and it’s this catharsis, and so by having the heroine of this other book really not know what was happening, you’re removing her agency and her choice, and it makes it much less satisfying.

Sarah:  Even Gone Girl, she has the choice to do a whole lot of dastardly things and does it.

Elyse:  Yeah, I mean, Gone Girl, I, I don’t recommend, you know, because your husband had an affair, framing him for your murder.  That’s a little extreme, but, you know, whatevs.

Sarah:  Stranger things have been done by dudes to their wives, I would just like to point out.

Elyse:  Yes.  But the, the guy that she does kill in the book and the movie, whose name I can’t remember but he’s played by Neil Patrick Harris, you get the impression that this dude, when she kills him you realize she, it’s because she realizes, I’m never getting out of this house.  Like, this guy’s nuts, and I’m in big trouble here, and so you do feel that in a lot of ways it was justified.  The movie didn’t quite go there.  They really made him a victim, where in the book you’re like, uh, she hasn’t seen this guy since she was a teenager, and she shows up, and he has a room in his house that he built for when she came back to him with all of her favorite things from her teenager-hood in it.  So he’s fucked up.

Sarah:  Yeahhh.  That’s –

Elyse:  Yeah, yeah.

Sarah:  – that’s messed up.

Elyse:  That’s a story that doesn’t end well, so when she kills him you’re like, yeah, ok.

Sarah:  Probably the best thing that needed to happen there.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  It’s almost like when you read about people who have stalkers, and they try to convince law enforcement, this person isn’t going to stop.  This person is not going to stop.  No one believes me how bad this is.  Or when women get harassed online, same thing.

Elyse:  Yep.

Sarah:  Yes, I understand that to you it’s just Twitter, but there are people who are handing out my personal information to other people who have no boundary issues and will come and find me, and I am – you have to convince people that you are in danger, and you have to convince people that they’re not doing enough, and you have to –

Elyse:  Yep.

Sarah:  – and you have to convince people that the actions – in the, in the case of these books, these same people have to convince the reader that the actions they’re taking are justified, which would seem on the surface to be very difficult, but then when you enter the, the actual world of the story, it’s perfectly understandable.

Elyse:  And so many of the women in these books come in with some kind of deficit that makes them less believable.  Rachel in The Girl on the Train is an alcoholic.  In The Woman in Cabin 10, she has, she has depression, and so they assume that apparently depression leads to, I don’t know, fucking hallucinations of murder, and she’s not a reliable witness.

Sarah:  No?

Elyse:  And so there’s so, there’s so much gaslighting, and I think when you look at traditional female detectives, even, we were talking about, like, Miss, Mish, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries – I can never say that –

Sarah:  Miz Fisher – it helps if you put a Z on the end of Miz.

Elyse:  Miz.

Sarah:  Miz Fisher.

Elyse:  Miz Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.

Sarah:  That’s right.

Elyse:  She’s always cool and composed and collected and unflappable, and so that lends her an air of credibility –

Sarah:  Yep.

Elyse:  – and what you’re seeing in these books is women having full emotional experiences because, I think, like most people, if I saw a murder, I’d freak the fuck out.

Sarah:  Yep.  And it, and it echoes what women are told repeatedly in every other arena.  You can’t be trusted to accurately report what you saw.  You can’t be trusted because you have depression.  You can’t be trusted with your own biological decisions.  You can’t be trusted what to do with your body.  You can’t be trusted to select your own doctors.  You can’t be trusted to run your own life.  You can’t be trusted to vote.  You can’t be trusted.  Women are not to be trusted.

Elyse:  It’s hysteria, man.  It’s all the craziness that stems from the uterus.

Sarah:  Yeah, my uterus isn’t so much crazy as it is really fucking pissed and tired of this bullshit.

Elyse:  As is mine.

Sarah:  Yes.

Elyse:  They could have, our uteruses could have a party.  A rage party.

Sarah:  And one of the things that, that we, we talked about the first time we did this was the number of movies that feature scary female ghosts.

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  Because when I was doing the prep for this episode, there was that article that I sent you from Bitch Media about the feminist power female ghosts and how so many horror movies now have female antagonists that are ghosts, but they’re terrifying because of their humanity.  It’s not the supernatural part; it’s the fact that they have completely understandable, justifiable rage – [laughs] – and –

Elyse:  Right, they’re –

Sarah:  – and they’re going to fuck shit up.

Elyse:  If you’re being haunted by a female ghost, it’s not –

Sarah:  Yes.

Elyse:  – you fucked something up, right.  Like, you had this coming, and now you just have to live with the consequences –

Sarah:  Yes.

Elyse:  – usually.  And I think the –

Sarah:  You have made a big, big error.

Elyse:  Right.  The female ghost trope is so satisfying and, I think, so terrifying to a lot of men because it’s saying, okay, here’s a woman who, bad shit has been done to her, and now she has got unlimited power to fuck up your life, and she’s not going anywhere, right.  You can’t make her leave, you can’t call the police, and now exactly, it, it flips the role, right.  So when you’re the dude being haunted by the female ghost, nobody fucking believes you, which is exactly what we’re saying happens to women in media and fiction all, and in real life, all the time.

Sarah:  Yep.

Elyse:  Oh, sure, yeah, this scary thing’s happening to you, wink, wink, nod.  You know, maybe you should stop drinking so much.  It, it, it’s putting men in the position that they put women in that they find then terrifying.  It’s like –

Sarah:  Yes, and it’s a total inversion of power.

Elyse:  Yes!

Sarah:  One of the things that I, that I really thought was interesting in that article, because it’s, it’s one of a lot of articles I’ve read recently about something that I believe is generally termed post-feminist rage, although I haven’t really unpacked that term to know whether or not that’s, like, the right application for what I’ve been reading, that the women ghosts are sympathetic because they’re scary, they have all of the anger of living women and none of the societal restrictions.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  So operating on the idea that men fear women and men most of all fear women in power and fear, fear female power, the idea of a woman ghost or a female ghost who has all of the anger and none of the limitation is doubly terrifying, because there’s nothing holding her back from exercising that rage.

Elyse:  Carrie recently sent me a review to proofread for her for a movie called I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, I think, and –

Sarah:  Yes, I saw that in, I saw that in WordPress.  I haven’t read it yet.

Elyse:  – and one of the things she talked about, that the heroine in that movie is a hospice nurse, and she called out all of the horror movies that feature a woman who is somehow isolated and in a caregiver role, so you’ve got, like, Mama, The Babadook, there’s a new movie coming out I’m totally going to see called Shut In.  I mean, you could – I think she, like, was able to list, like, eight off the top of her head, and I think it’s really interesting that it draws this parallel between being isolated in a caregiver role where in some ways you sort of lose yourself mentally, you lose yourself physically, because your whole life is devoted to taking care of this other person who is unable to, and terror and, and hauntings and, and monsters in the closet, you know?

Sarah:  And you have no more identity because your role is, your, your life is subsumed into caring for this other person.

Elyse:  Right!

Sarah:  Which is, you know, a scary place that women find themselves in constantly.  If you’re not caring for your children, then you turn around and start caring for your parents or other adults or your in-laws or your husband.  You end up caring for someone else without taking care of yourself.

Elyse:  And that’s just something that women are expected to do.

Sarah:  Which leads to a lot of delayed gratification, regret, and probably rage.

Elyse:  No!  It all comes back to rage!

Sarah:  Right?

Elyse:  I would just like to point out to you, our podcast-listening audience, that my husband, the love of my life, is feeding our cat, who has irritable bowel syndrome, a mushroom Swiss burger.

Sarah:  As you do.  It’s going to give him really good farts.

Elyse:  You’re, you’re cleaning up that litter box, Rich.  He, he looks ashamed.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Busted!

[Laughter]

Elyse:  Ohhh, man.  Yeah.  And it’s not just – I, I think female rage translates best to thrillers and psychological thrillers, but I mean, we like the Crows series too, and that’s all about the rage.

Sarah:  I was just going to say that the, the books that I have been re-listening to while I walk the dogs lately are the Crows series, and the entire worldbuilding of the entire series, the whole idea of the Crows rests on the mantra that they let rage be their guide.  That their rage is the reason they do things.  Rage at the inequitable treatment, the abuses, the sexual assaults, the physical assaults, the many, many slights done to women.  The Crows exist outside of all of those societal restrictions.  They have zero fucks to give, and they’re the harbingers of death.  Like, if the Crows show up, much like a female ghost –

Elyse:  You’re fucked.

Sarah:  – you have fucked – yes, you’re screwed, and you have fucked shit up, and it’s time for your problem to end.

Elyse:  There’s –

Sarah:  So the whole idea that this, this heroine group is centered on rage, I’m actually having trouble finding other books, with the exception of Dragon Actually with Annwyl the Bloody, which I think I recommended to Rich.

Elyse:  Yes, we have Dragon Actually.

Sarah:  Oh – actually, you have Dragon Actually?

Elyse:  Actually, we have Dragon Actually.  We have not read it yet, but we have it.

Sarah:  Ohhh.

Elyse:  It is in our possession.

Sarah:  It, you, you’re going to like it.

Elyse:  I think that, the other thing I really like about the Crows is, yes, there’s this rage, but it’s a sisterhood, right.  Like, they don’t have to necessarily like each other or get along all the time or be super best friends, but if you fuck shit up for one of them, all of them are coming after your ass.

Sarah:  – not like that person, you may fight with them constantly, but when you are in battle, that person unquestionably has your back.

Elyse:  Yes.

Sarah:  And you don’t usually see a lot of that sort of squad or battalion or pack.  That, that sort of thing is applied a lot to male groups of characters –

Elyse:  Right, but not –

Sarah:  – but it, not as much to the women, which is probably why I’m so eager to read more stories with women in witch covens and in groups where the interpersonal problems are real, but the unconditional support is also real, because women are not taught to do that for other women.  That is not a priority that we are taught by anyone.

Elyse:  And I think too often in the romance genre we have the trope of women kind of cutting each other down or competing for a man or, you know, the, the bitchy evil stepsister character, and we don’t have enough romance that shows powerful, meaningful female friendships.

Sarah:  There, there isn’t enough, I don’t think.  There are more of them.  What I find the most bothersome is when you have a heroine in a story who is so isolated, who has no other supportive women in her life, and that that’s treated as normal and acceptable.  And I’m not sure if it’s that way because you can’t have another woman who might outshine the heroine in some way, or you can’t have more than one woman in the story in a way that detracts from the relationship between the hero and heroine, but I like when the heroine has friends who are real friends, not just frenemies or sequel-bait, you know what I mean?

Elyse:  Exactly, exactly.  No, and I think part of the reason I really love Christina Lauren so much is that – and, and to some extent I guess they are sequel-bait, but she does write female friendships in, I think, a really great way.

Sarah:  And it’s nice to read women who have support for one another, you know?

Elyse:  Absolutely!  I just reviewed a book called Perfect Prey, and the book is about a woman who is, she, she and her friend go to a music festival they’re reporting on in Serbia.  They’re reporting for, like, a fashion magazine, and her friend goes missing at the festival, and so she’s the one who really pushes everyone to, to look for her and to take this disappearance seriously, ‘cause the police are kind of like, well, you know, maybe she went home with some guy and she’s still sleeping it off, and one of the things that the book does really well is talks about the fact that you can have a really powerful, passionate relationship with someone of the same sex that is not sexual.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  And it can be completely life-changing.

Sarah:  And it can be just as powerful and as important as the relationship that you would have with the romantic hero in a story.

Elyse:  Exactly.

Sarah:  It doesn’t have to compete.  It’s very strange when that happens, that there’s this expectation that there can only be one real passionate relationship.  That’s just, I just don’t think that’s true!

Elyse:  No, and I think, you know, the most powerful relationships I’ve had in my life have been with women usually.  I don’t think that’s unusual.  I think women have really intense friendships and sisterhoods.

Sarah:  And it’s, and it’s almost in contrary direction to what women are taught, which is to tear each other down.  I think the, the greatest tool of patriarchy is women turning on each other for not fitting into the correct description.

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Which is really, really frustrating, and I think part of also where these women ghosts come from.  You know what I mean?

Elyse:  Right.  I was going to go with the most powerful tool of the patriarchy was Spanx, but I like your answer better.

Sarah:  The, it, you know, it’s very true.  It is very, very true that Spanx are a powerful tool of evil.

Elyse:  They are!  Down with Spanx.

Sarah:  They’re, they make my stomach hurt.

Elyse:  I don’t wear them, so I don’t – but I have graduated to putting on panties that, like, just kind of cover all your shit now instead of trying to be cute.  Like the giant, comfortable, grandma underwear?

Sarah:  They’re so comfortable.

Elyse:  It’s amazing.  Full-ass coverage, that’s where it’s at.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Full-ass coverage.

Sarah:  So true.  So do you have any books that you’re reading that you want to recommend?

Elyse:  I have some books that I’m reading that I want to recommend.  I just, well, we talked about The Girl on the Train –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  – and we talked about Gone Girl.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Elyse:  All the books that have – I, I don’t know what the fuck is going on with “Girl” in the title, though.  That bothers me.

Sarah:  Well, it’s, it’s diminutive singularity, I think.  It’s the diminutive single woman.  Oh, she’s a girl.  On her own.  And she’s non-threatening, which is not exactly the case.

Elyse:  No.  The Woman in Cabin 10 was phenomenal.  I talked a little bit about Perfect Prey by Laura Salters.  We talked about the Crows series.

Sarah:  Yep.

Elyse:  There’s a lot more of this psychological thriller fiction coming out that features bad-ass women, and there’s a lot of books coming up that I’m very excited to read, but I don’t want to be a dickbag and recommend them on the podcast, ‘cause you guys can’t read ‘em yet.

Sarah:  I understand.  One thing I do want to ask you about –

Elyse:  Mm-hmm?

Sarah:  You like true crime podcasts, and a lot of people were asking about your recommendations.  Now I posted them in the comments to that podcast entry, but what particular true crime podcasts do you really, really like?

Elyse:  My absolute favorite, and it’s listed as a comedy podcast, not a true crime podcast, is My Favorite Murder, and it’s two female comedians who, they each, on every episode they tell each other the story of a true crime, and they’re hilarious.  They are just really, really funny and irreverent and subversive.  Like, they would be a hundred percent there for Team Don’t Fuck That Guy, right.  So –

Sarah:  Totally on Team Don’t Fuck That Guy.

Elyse:  Team Don’t Fuck That Guy, that’s important.  I like that.  I like Generation Why.  There is a podcast that’s actually really interesting; it is – I’m trying to pull it up now on Stitcher – it is a, a former FBI profiler who now is a, of course, consultant on Criminal Minds, and a woman who was a criminal profiler in Britain and now actually started a stalking advocacy organization called Paladin, and usually one other person, and they go over true crimes and, but they do it from a very kind of forensic in-depth way, and they’re, they’re very thorough and kind of meticulous.  It’s less about titillation and more about what can we really analyze from this, what can we really take away.  It’s called Real Crime Profile.  That’s really good.  What else?  I like Criminal.  Yeah, those are kind of my big ones, those four are the ones I listen to, and then I check the door obsessively.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  Make sure it’s locked.

Sarah:  Make sure the door is locked?

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Yeah, I understand that.

Elyse:  Or I make –

Sarah:  I don’t think I could listen to true crime podcasts, but the, I know the audience for true crime is quite huge.

Elyse:  It is, and I think in some ways it’s kind of looking under the bed and, and forcing yourself to kind of face the monster that scares you, and that’s a little bit thrilling, but I think it’s also in some ways empowering.

Sarah:  Are they all very much domestic set?

Elyse:  No.  They will, they will go abroad as well, in terms of the crimes.  I’m sorry.

Sarah:  I meant, like, domestic crimes, like, are they set at home?

Elyse:  It depends on the crime.  I mean, I think that there’s, I think the vast preponderance of crimes are domestic.  I think you kind of have a, you’re, you’re already skewed in that direction, but I, I’d say it’s, they try to keep it fairly diverse.

Sarah:  ‘Cause there’s an anthology you might really like.  So, Sarah Weinman, who I know personally a little bit, ‘cause she’s the other Sarah W. – she’s the original Sarah W. before I was Sarah W. – but she edited an anthology called Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives:  Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense.  So –

Elyse:  I think I need that.

Sarah:  I think you do too.  It is an anthology collection of pioneering women writers who created what Sarah calls the domestic suspense genre, and her, her thought is that Gillian Flynn and Sue Grafton draw from these women who wrote in the ‘40s through the ‘70s.  One story that is constantly excerpted, excerpted in the book of, books of short stories and literature that I had to read when I was in high school and also in college was the story called “Wide O.”  Have you ever read this?

Elyse:  No!

Sarah:  Okay, this is – this is really Elyse bait.  I have to figure out how to describe it without giving it away.  Okay.  So, “Wide O” is a short story by Elsin Ann Graffam, and it is a first person short story.  I think it is, like, one page.  Yeah, it’s one page.  I will send you the PDF, and it is really very subtle but super fucking creepy the more you think about it.  I will send you the PDF.

Elyse:  I’m very excited for this.

Sarah:  But it’s that sort of thing like a woman at home in some way being terrorized or being the terror.

Elyse:  I, I think for me what really appeals to me in both true crime and in thriller fiction or suspense fiction, I, I read a lot of stories about people who’ve vanished or have disappeared, and I love it when you give me a story that makes no sense, right.  Like, there’s no way that this thing could have happened, and I need to know the ending to it, right.  So when I read a book and it’s like, oh, we walked in on this family that’s been murdered, it’s like, ehh, but then if you read a book where it’s like some-, somewhere in these five minutes this woman vanished, and no one can figure out how or where she went, it’s like, oh, give me that, I need to know the answer, right.  So the more mindfuck-y it gets, the better.

Sarah:  And if you’re listening to true crime, there might not be an answer.

Elyse:  Right.  Which drives Rich nuts.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Elyse:  There’s this TV show that I watch on Investigation Discovery called Disappeared, and it’s about people who have disappeared, and most of the time you don’t find out what happened to them.  Like, there was one woman who stayed home from work sick and then left a note on her kitchen counter for her husband that she was going for a walk and, like, was never seen again?  And it drives him nuts because there’s no closure –

Sarah:  Yep.

Elyse:  – but I love it.  Like, I, I, give me all the details so I can try and figure it out.

Sarah:  And then you come up with what you think happened.

Elyse:  Right.

Sarah:  Your kink is not my kink, but the degree to which you enjoy your kink makes me very happy.

Elyse:  Man, if you, like, give me a story about someone dis-, disappearing, like, off a cruise ship, like, give me a closed door mystery where there’s, nothing makes sense, I am one thousand percent here for it.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Okay, that’s very cool.

Elyse:  For a while I was obsessed with the disappearance of Maura Murray, which is a true story.  I don’t know if you remember this; it was a college student in Massachusetts who got in her car one night, and she was going to go up to the White Mountains in, I don’t know if that’s New Hampshire or Vermont – I apologize; I mix those two up a lot.  I apologize to New Hampshire and Vermont listeners – and her car spun out on a road, ‘cause it was in the winter, and a truck driver pulled over and asked if she needed help, and she said, you know, no, I’ve got my cell phone.  I’m going to call my dad and Triple A, and he said it was very apparent, like, she didn’t want to get in the car with him, and she was being very kind of safety conscious, and he was still concerned about her, ‘cause it’s dark and it’s icy out, so he gets a little further up the road, he calls it in to the police.  So ten minutes later the police arrive, and they find her car with everything in it, the door’s open, and she’s gone, and you’re in the middle of the woods, there’s nothing there, and so somewhere between him seeing her ten minutes ago and the police arriving, she vanished, and to this day, no one knows what happened to her, and stuff like that, those kind of mysteries really intrigue me.  I love it.

Sarah:  And it, and it’s, and it’s scary because it’s almost always women –

Elyse:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and they – or children, vulnerable – and they disappear with zero trace.  Like, there’s no clue.  There’s nothing.

Elyse:  There’s a really interesting show, also on, I think, Investigation Discovery, called A Crime to Remember, and it’s a historical crime, so it’s happened in the United States, probably within, like, the last, I would say, sixty, seventy years, and they do a really good job of showing how that changed the way criminal justice is handled or kind of how we perceive crime moving forward.  Like, what happened in this particular case that changed things in the future, and why was it significant?

Sarah:  Crimes against women don’t tend to change very much, but when women commit crimes, it changes a lot.

Elyse:  I mean, look at the, like, man, I was a kid when it happened, but Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband’s penis, and that’s all everyone talked about for, like, five years.

Sarah:  Right?  And yet how many domestic rapes have there been?

Elyse:  Oh, like, I don’t even want to think about it.

Sarah:  Exact-, oh, yeah, but the minute the woman comes back?  Not only did she cut it out, cut it off, she got in the car and then chucked it out the window.

Elyse:  [Laughs] I’m just thinking about, like, driving home from work, how many times I see someone in front of me throw some shit out their car window, and now, I mean, I forever wonder if it was a penis.

Sarah:  Right, like, if it wasn’t a penis, if it was a cigarette, I’m going to toss it back in the car with you.

Elyse:  [Laughs] Oh, man.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s episode.  I hope you enjoyed our conversation and that we didn’t spoil the hell out of everything that you love.  Elyse and I are both very curious to hear what you thought of Doctor Strange if you saw it, or if you have suggestions of books that are filled with heroine rage, you can email us at [email protected], or you can call and leave a voicemail at 1-201-371-3272.  We love hearing from you, and if you have ideas or things you’d like to say or you’d like to tell us what you thought of Doctor Strange or Gone Girl or Gone Strange or any of the other things that we talked about, please let us know!

This podcast is sponsored by Elizabeth Hoyt, the New York Times bestselling author of the Maiden Lane series.  Duke of Pleasure, the latest Maiden Lane adventure, features Alf, who is the new Ghost of St. Giles and a female swashbuckling vigilante.  She teams up with Hugh Fitzroy, the Duke of Kyle, a stern ex-soldier tasked with bringing down an evil group of aristocrats with Alf’s help.  This is a romance that has it all:  sword fighting, sexytimes, pants feelings, danger, passion, intrigue, and a heroine that totally kicks ass.  If you are new to the series, you can trust Smart Bitches reviewer Elyse – you totally can – who says, you don’t have to read the Maiden Lane books in order, but they’re so much fun that you might as well.  Your credit card might hate me, but you will not.  Start binge reading today!

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is my favorite album of Christmas music, which isn’t saying a lot because I only have one favorite album, and it is this one!  This is Deviations Project.  This is their holiday album, Adeste Fiddles, and this is their version of “Three Ships,” a very classic old tune.  I will have links to the music, the album, where you can buy it, including iTunes and Amazon, and their MySpace page, because nothing gives me joy than linking to a MySpace page.  It gives me complete, utter joy.  Seriously, I love it.

If you are an iTunes type of person, I invite you to have a look at our iTunes page at iTunes.com/DBSA, and I would also like to humbly invite you to take a look at our podcast Patreon.  You can see it at patreon.com/SmartBitches.  For as little as one dollar a month, you can make a deeply appreciated contribution to help keep the show going, help me commission transcripts, and help me make sure that the podcast stays as the just about professional with, you know, extra dog barking, better equipment, and, you know, if we’re really lucky, Orville or Wilbur will start meowing into the microphone ‘cause they want to crawl in the sound box.

As always, I will have links to all of the books that we discussed.  I also have a link to a PDF version of “Wide O” by Elsin Ann Graffam, which is a one-page creepy short story you might really like.

And don’t forget, at the very end after the music, we have a very inappropriate – well, mostly inappropriate; we could get a lot worse – outtake of me and Elyse discussing dick pics.

On behalf of Elyse and myself and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[best Christmas music]

Sarah:  I remember when the dick pic scandal with Brett Favre went out.  Remember that?

Elyse:  Yeah.  You know what?  No one wants to see your fucking dick.  I don’t care if you’re a politician or a professional athlete –

Sarah:  Nobody wants to see your dick.

Elyse:  – no one wants to see your dick.  No one wants to see your dick.

Sarah:  But the thing about Favre is that he sent, allegedly sent a picture of himself when he wasn’t hard.  Like, why?

Elyse:  Why?  Exactly!

Sarah:  Why would you do that?

Elyse:  Right, because he’s so full of his own fucking ego that he’s like, oh, I’m going to send my sad-ass, wrinkly, limp dick to someone, and they’re going to feel honored by it, and you know what, dude, no one wants to see your dick.  Even if someone specifically asked to see your dick, I’m going to say eighty percent of the time, they’re just being polite.  Like, they don’t want to see your dick.  No one wants to see your dick.  No one.

Sarah:  And moreover, he now does these advertisements for Wrangler that have, like, extra room in the crotch, and I just die laughing every time I see them.

Elyse:  Right, ‘cause Brett Favre does not need extra room in his crotch.

Sarah:  Yeah, I’ve seen it when it’s not hard, dude.  We’re good; we’re fine.

Elyse:  He’s got plenty of space in there.  Maybe he puts, like, his keys in there.  I don’t, I don’t know what his –

Sarah:  I don’t know.

Elyse:  – particular situation is.  No, nobody wants to see your dick, and I think it’s fascinating that there’s this subset of dudes who are completely astonished by the fact that women find photos of their dicks offensive and upsetting.  Like, yeah!

Sarah:  It’s like Amanda’s favorite shirt says, no one cares about your stupid boner.

Elyse:  No one really does.

Sarah:  Nope.

Elyse:  No one does.  Nope.  No.  No.