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

by Anne Helen Petersen

The #MeToo movement has provided a necessary reckoning: proof that feminism is still very much necessary.

Women like the dozen who’ve accused him of sexual impropriety and/or assault, and Clinton herself, whom he’d referred to as a “nasty woman.”

Through this lens, unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

Even though women have been participating “in sport” for more than a century, such diversion has always been fraught: a distraction, but not a profession.

Femininity cloaked power and strength, made it more palatable, less threatening.

Serena’s body isn’t built to emulate the look of the model in an Ann Taylor shift dress. It’s built—through an exacting and grueling regimen—to decimate her opponents. And the suggestion that that body, too, is beautiful and sexy—in spite of, or even because of, its threat to the norms of white femininity—will continue to be threatening until the standards of beauty are decentered from those of the white upper class.

“I love my body, and I would never change anything about it,” she told Self. “I’m not asking you to like my body. I’m just asking you to let me be me. Because I’m going to influence a girl who does look like me, and I want her to feel good about herself.”

Like all spectacles, the confident fat woman is magnetic; the funny fat woman doubly so.

interesting than their size or what they put on their body shouldn’t be a radical or unruly idea. But that doesn’t mean, in today’s society, that it isn’t.

The privilege to fuck around intertwines with the privilege to only accept labor that makes you feel good.

Madonna also embodies the ideologies of postfeminism, with its attendant privileging of the desires, power, and pleasure of the individual woman over actual equality and rights for women in general.

It makes sense that women’s inclination toward disordered eating spikes so sharply during and after pregnancy: that’s how strongly weight gain of any kind, even related to pregnancy, is stigmatized.

She should be everything, which means she should be nothing.

“Shrillness” is just a word to describe what happens when a woman, with her higher-toned voice, attempts to speak loudly. A pejorative, in other words, developed specifically to shame half of the population when they attempt to command attention in the same manner as men.

19 Andi Zeisler, cofounder of Bitch magazine, explained “bitch” as a word “we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men . . . We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it.

if we’re past the age of sexism, after all, then men shouldn’t feel threatened by powerful women.

Feminism felt not just important, or fashionable, but essential.

Gender dysphoria, like homosexuality, was long classified as a psychological disorder.

“trans women are disrespected and treated terribly when they don’t pass, but if they do pass they’re called out for upholding the gender binary and cis standards of beauty. It is an impossible bind.”

the primary visual purpose of a woman’s body is not the pleasure of men.

nakedness “does not move us to empathy, but to disillusion and dismay.”

Nakedness, in other words, is ugly: “We are immediately disturbed by wrinkles, pouches, and other small imperfections,” Clark declared. Which is why the artist does not “wish to imitate” the naked figure, but to “perfect” it.3

John Berger puts it, “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and not recognized for oneself.”

Such successfully “normalized” bodies can vary somewhat in the size of the ass, the legs, or the breasts, but their beauty is rooted in their discipline, through either exercise or surgery.

If spending this much time becoming deeply acquainted with these women’s work and reception has taught me one thing, it’s just how difficult and deeply disheartening it can be to be a woman in the public eye.

All of these women are as imperfect as you or me, but when they say or do the wrong thing—or even say or do the right thing—the backlash can be swift, exacting, and cruel.

To be an unruly woman today is to oscillate between the postures of fearlessness and self-doubt, between listening to the voices that tell a woman she is too much and one’s own, whispering and yelling I am already enough, and always have been.