Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

by Anne Helen Petersen

Modern capitalist society hinges on its citizens’ constant drive to consume, but the successful American is someone who’s able, whether through genetics or self-regimentation, to contain the effects of that consumption.

In the end, matriarchy isn’t the fear. Rather, it’s the idea that women will define their own value, and their own futures, on their own terms instead of by terms men have laid out—put differently, that each gender, and each individual, will have the power to determine their own destiny. To slightly modify the old bumper sticker, it’s the radical notion that both men and women are people.

As Bordo explains, “the control of female appetite for food is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger—for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification—be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited.” Put differently, hunger has become the antithesis of “good” femininity: to eat, to desire, to be unsatisfied is to be a “bad woman.”