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

by Anne Helen Petersen

Their bodies, words, and actions have become a locus for the type of inflammatory rhetoric usually reserved only for political figures.

It’s as if each of these women is constantly igniting the line of acceptable behavior: you don’t know where it is until she steps over it, at which point it bursts into flames.

The most potent manifestation in recent history, however, dates to the early nineties, when Roseanne Barr became the unruly woman par excellence: her show, Roseanne, dominated the television landscape, overtaking The Cosby Show as the top-rated program on television in 1989.

valence

trenchant

and her work make it abundantly clear: few things enrage, confuse, and repulse audiences more than the suggestion that the primary visual purpose of a woman’s body is not

the pleasure of men.