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

by Anne Helen Petersen

Of course, there have been unruly women for as long as there have been boundaries of what constitutes acceptable “feminine” behavior: women who, in some way, step outside the boundaries of good womanhood, who end up being labeled too fat, too loud, too slutty, too whatever characteristic women are supposed to keep under control. The hatred directed toward the unruly women of the 2016 campaign is simply an extension of the anxiety that’s accumulated around this type of woman for centuries.

the prevalence of straight white women serves to highlight an ugly truth: that the difference between cute, acceptable unruliness and unruliness that results in ire is often as simple as the color of a woman’s skin, whom she prefers to sleep with, and her proximity to traditional femininity. When a black woman talks too loud or too honestly, she becomes “troubling” or “angry” or “out of control”; a queer woman who talks about sex suddenly becomes proof that all gay people are intrinsically promiscuous. It’s one thing to be a young, cherub-faced, straight woman doing and saying things that make people uncomfortable. It’s quite another—and far riskier—to do those same things in a body that is not white, not straight, not slender, not young, or not American.

Celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work: the way we pinpoint and police representations of everything from blackness to queerness, from femininity to pregnancy. Which is why the success of these unruly women is inextricable from the confluence of attitudes toward women in the 2010s: the public reembrace of feminism set against a backdrop of increased legislation of women’s bodies, the persistence of the income gap, the policing of how women’s bodies should look and act in public, and the election of Trump. 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.

Yet for all these women’s visibility and profitability, they compete against a far more palatable—and, in many cases, more successful—form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom. Exemplified by Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Blake Lively, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ivanka Trump, these women rarely trend on Twitter, but they’ve built tremendously successful brands by embracing the “new domesticity,” defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first-century gentility.

unruliness is still largely the provenance of women who are white and straight.

Williams was, and remains, too strong: in her body, but also in her personality, her resilience, and her fortitude in the two decades she’s spent holistically reorganizing the standards of a sport from which people with her skin color, class, and background have been historically excluded.

To understand what makes Williams’s body and strength so unruly requires an understanding of how black bodies, and black female bodies in particular, have been depicted, understood, and policed throughout history—and just how much friction resulted when the Williams sisters entered one of the most exclusive sports in the world. That friction has exposed the rotting wood at the center of an aging, if beautifully glossed, institution, forcing an uncomfortable examination of both the legacy of tennis and what a female athlete can and should do in public.

The truth is that there has been racism in tennis, and it has been directed at the Williamses, although it has rarely been explicit. Rather, it has been conveyed by innuendo and insinuation, and in a subtle disproportion in the way people respond to them, alternating between vitriol and over-congratulation.”

But that lie—whose purpose was to allow white people to continue to think they weren’t racist, even when their actions and words indicated otherwise—was one in which the Williams sisters, like their father, refused to participate. They rejected the idea that they should assimilate to the white codes of the tennis world. Instead, they posed the question of their difference over and over again—in

Their power and charisma invigorated the world of tennis, but the Williamses rejected the presumed posture of gratitude and humility.

To spectators accustomed to the pleated skirt and the sleeveless tennis shirt, Serena’s body was “formidable” simply because it refused to cloak itself in the traditional garments of femininity. Instead of hiding the parts of her that distinguished her from her (white) competitors—including her muscular thighs and arms, her hair, her black skin—she accentuated them. And she owned it:

Title IX, passed in 1972, ostensibly righted that imbalance, forcing an equal number of girls’ sporting opportunities for every boys’ one, thereby paving the way for generations of women’s basketball and soccer players. Yet this supposed equality—which coincided with the women’s movement and sexual freedoms facilitated by birth control—amplified anxiety around women in sports, especially the figure of the tomboy, who eschewed the traditional trappings of femininity.

Hence, the policing of the female athlete, who faces the daunting task of maintaining a body strong enough to excel at her sport of choice but contained enough so as not to incite fear about transcending her given place in the world.

Historically, women with bodies like Serena’s—or fellow unruly woman Nicki Minaj’s—have been exoticized, literally put on display, like the Hottentot Venus of South Africa. To turn black women into objectified others was to underline their difference: they may be beautiful, but they are of another kind, separate from the dominant understanding of attractiveness. Their bodies are treated as Halloween costumes or jokes, a concept manifested most blatantly when Andy Roddick and Caroline Wozniacki padded themselves up to play “as Serena.”

The rhetoric around Serena’s body also suggests that her skill and power stem not from hard work but from difference: the idea that black bodies rely on “natural athleticism,” not strategy.

As Brittney C. Cooper of Crunk Feminist Collective points out, “these narratives about Black bodies as ‘naturally athletic,’ ‘more powerful,’ ‘more wild,’ ‘less thoughtful,’ and ‘less strategic’ and black female bodies as ‘(un)naturally strong, invulnerable, and unattractive’—are central to Western narratives of white racial superiority.”40

The anxiety centers on Williams, but it’s really a manifestation of a larger fear that she’ll turn tennis, one of the last bastions of proper whiteness, into a black sport.

And so: Imagine Serena not as an aggressive, aggrieved participant in a sport that struggled to make room for her, but as one who forced her way in and made space for all who followed. Imagine her as she will be remembered: a woman in a catsuit, a woman in beaded braids, a woman yelling and cursing and grinning and laughing and twirling and dominating, in a way that may never be replicated, in a sport that recoiled from her at every serve.