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

by Anne Helen Petersen

Clinton had long refused the sentiment of “standing by your man.” In a 60 Minutes interview during the 1992 buildup to the election, intended to confront initial rumors of infidelity, she declared, “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.” For her detractors, the quote became ammunition: proof that she looked down on housewives, traditional values, Tammy Wynette, or anyone who liked the song “Stand by Your Man.” The backlash became so extreme that Clinton was forced to apologize to Wynette.

In a study conducted over the course of several decades in India, certain villages were assigned, at random, to be run by women. All the candidates for office were women; women were the only choice. At first, citizens still voiced a preference for male leadership—yet as with Clinton’s time in office, their rating of women’s competency, once they were in power, increased. Still, it was only after these villages were forced to have not just one female leader, but two, that their citizens demonstrated an increased willingness to vote for women in “open” elections.41

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.” The most vivid manifestation of that badness, that unruliness, is fat on one’s body, implying a lack of control, a lack of respect toward social mores.

To refuse others’ understanding of yourself and your capabilities doesn’t just feel like self-determination: it’s moving from being the object in someone else’s narrative to the subject of one’s own.