Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers
“Women have always been monsters… But a monster is not something to dismiss, or look down on.”
To mark the anniversary of Jude Doyle’s 2019 book DEAD BLONDES AND BAD MOTHERS: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power [book available here], BPAL is proud to present a new collection of perfume blends inspired by this brilliant work of nonfiction.
DEAD BLONDES digs into the meaty places where pop-culture, history, and folklore overlap, presenting a series of monstrous feminine archetypes which perpetually recur in storytelling – including the stories we construct around current events, or events in our own lives.
Each archetype comments differently on the roles that women and femmes have been relegated to throughout society; many of these have been reclaimed and turned inside out over time, evolving from punishments into sources of power.
“This is a dark book, but some things are clearer in the darkness. This is a violent book, but an unsparing confrontation with violence can bring us to what lies beneath and beyond it.”
Jude Doyle (@byjudedoyle, he/they) is the author of Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why (Melville House, 2016) and Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power (Melville House, 2019). Dead Blondes was named a Kirkus Best Non-Fiction Book of 2019, and was shortlisted for Starburst Magazine’s Brave New Words Award. In addition, Doyle founded the feminist blog Tiger Beatdown in 2008, writes an ongoing column at GEN, has a prolific freelance journalism career, and once did a flow-chart about farts for the New York Times.”
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Alien/Siren Perfume Oil
Add to cart“Women are defined from the outside, in terms of how they seem to men, rather than from the inside, as thinking, feeling subjects. They are not fellow people, not even a different or worse variety of person, but simply the opposite of men, and hence, the opposite of human.
Which leads to the question of how you can have sex with something that isn’t human. In many myths, heterosexuality is portrayed as a kind of legalized bestiality, and attractive women are alluring, predatory, half-human monsters: fairy wives, snake-women, others whose beauty is a thin veneer over their dangerous and alien psyches.”
A sebaceous, slick reptilian perfume: green and black vegetal musks, kelp, sea salt, blackened opoponax, violet leaf, Siamese red benzoin, davana, squid ink, and ambergris accord.
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Bluebeard’s Wife Perfume Oil
Add to cart“Bluebeard stories provide one of the few venues women have to talk about the pervasive nature of marital violence. Like the slashers, they convert private drama into public spectacle, giving women a language for their pain.”
Red rose petals floating in brackish salt water.
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Dead Blonde Perfume Oil
Add to cart“Of course young women enjoy slashers. Adolescent girls have spent their lives absorbing our cultural disgust for womanhood, only to find themselves thrust into the middle of it, suddenly the butt of every joke. Their underlying anxieties are hit with a toxic sludge of predatory attention, sexual objectification, and impossible standards, growing to fifty times their natural size. It is not easy to become a monster. It is not fun to slip – suddenly and for the rest of your life – out of humanity and into womanhood. Girls are left reckoning with the fact that their social status, their human value, even their basic survival, are all suddenly contingent on men. Thus, at the exact moment they’re beginning to have sex and enter romantic relationships, girls watch stories in which a moment’s lapse in judgment, or a single instance of giving in to temptation, results and agony and annihilation – not because that’s what they want, but because it’s already happening, and they have precious few other ways to process it.”
A wilting corsage of tea roses and white roses, bearing forensic traces of honeyed lip gloss and coconut oil suntan lotion.
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Haunted Housewife Perfume Oil
Add to cart“When mothers try to live the way our culture encourages us to, as almost literally selfless vehicles for others’ fulfillment, we become something else, something cold and hungry, something you wouldn’t want to see standing over your bed in the dark.”
A thin, sorrowful, lonely scent: white musk and dust, elemi and white amber, carrot seed and opium tar accord.
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Mama Gein Perfume Oil
Add to cart“So there went Augusta, another woman crushed into nothing by a man’s world. It had happened to millions before her, and has happened to millions since.”
Crushed baby’s breath dusted with baby powder.
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Possessed Teen Perfume Oil
Add to cart“This is the ideological force driving all those stories about toxic period blood and PMS-induced hauntings. In a culture where we’re trained to protect children and loathe women, the border zone between the two states is the subject of intense superstition and terror.”
Skin musk and soap, smoldering with ash and exorcism incense.
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The Woman at the Edge of the Woods Perfume Oil
Add to cart“This is the primal threat in our earliest stories: a woman who lives on the outskirts of civilization, rejected by her community; a woman who is old, ugly, asexual; a woman who is, alternately, too beautiful, too sexual, too self-possessed; a woman who knows things others don’t know, and can do things others can’t do. When the loop of patriarchy closes, it can feel inescapable. Yet the way to freedom has been here, in our monster stories, all along. From the beginning, we’ve known that a woman who leaves society as we know it, who heads out to the dark and threatening spaces beyond the world we’ve built, will find not her death but her power.”
A scent of power and wisdom, resilience and rage: a patchouli bramble embraced by creeping ivy and rose thorns, protecting a glade populated with mandrake root, yarrow and nettle, Roman chamomile, purple sage, elderberries, sweet myrrh, smoky vanilla husk, and willow branches.
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Woman as Dragon Perfume Oil
Add to cart“The archaic mother – the mother who reproduces without male permission for her own satisfaction – is the least human of the female monsters because she poses the most profound existential threat… The Mother is female bodily self-determination, full-fledged and uncontrollable, out of the ocean and stomping skyscrapers, turning the male world to rubble. She is what happens when the Furies come home.”
A fiery red musk with crushed ginger root, black upturned soil, dragon’s blood resin, clove bud, pink peppercorn, tobacco absolute, red amber, patchouli, black oud, blood-caked tar, vetiver, and cedar.