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

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.

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.

unruliness can spark a firestorm, but it can also scorch the very ground on which they tread.

Any victory from that point forward would not be out of luck, or proximity to privilege, or pedigree. It would be through sheer strength, work, and will.

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.”

Women were often encouraged to take up sports without strong male counterparts (field hockey, volleyball) or that demanded little physical exertion (golf). If women’s high school sports programs existed, they were always secondary.

femininity. If one played “like a boy,” she’d never get a husband—or, even more dangerous, perhaps start to ask for the same privileges as men in other areas outside of sport, and never even need a husband.

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.

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.

“Overreacting a little much” is the sort of language used to censor unruly women. It’s

Fat is ugly, and dangerous, and an epidemic sweeping the country, this logic suggests—but you should love yourself!

A good fat body, then, is one that’s attempting—confidently! with love!—to erase itself. The body that refuses the pressure to do so, or even celebrates that refusal, becomes unruly. Like all spectacles, the confident

Put differently, her ability to access an inner unruly woman made her a massive star.

We only want unruly women when they can be contained on screen

fugue state.

“Anytime I was doing it, I was thinking ‘What the hell am I doing?’” she recalled. “I was in a fugue state.

But that sort of rage is unacceptable in polite society—so she has to effectively leave her body (or, more precisely, her head) to access it. In order to be unruly, she has to effectively lose consciousness.

The political power of drag resides in its ability to draw attention to just how performative gender can be. By amplifying characteristics of femininity or masculinity, it highlights their absurdity, their arbitrariness, and just how easily they can be applied and abandoned.

It’s also a double standard: all the best male characters are unkempt or flawed in some capacity. “A woman does the same thing and people are actually offended,” she said. “They’re offended that I don’t preen myself—even though it would be completely inappropriate for the character. . . . Don’t you go to the movies to see real people with real flaws and watch them try to get better? Without the mess you’ve got nothing.”31

But no matter how strong McCarthy’s language, or how unruly her characters, they’re accompanied—both rhetorically and visually—by the mild, sweet domesticity of McCarthy’s “real” self.

Which is to say: like Ivory Soap, she’s white and fundamentally inoffensive.

And in a country where power largely resides in your status as a consumer, declaring fat people a viable market is effectively asserting their equal citizenship.

Asserting that women are more 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.

When middle-class women moved into the workplace, it was celebrated as women’s “liberation”; in practice, it meant that women simply doubled their labor.

And the longer marriage and children are delayed (or refused altogether), the longer women have to explore or switch careers, or to experience weekends and non-work times not as time to serve others’ needs, but their own, or none at all.

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

That attitude is usually ascribed to the hazy swath of the American population known as “millennials,” but it’s a particularly raced and classed and educated sort of millennial—one whose ideas about work are often shaped by their parents, who desire more fulfilling work for themselves, and the media, which limits its conceptualization of desirable labor to that in creative fields.

Glazer describes a broad as “a full person,” which is an appropriate reflection of the ethos of the series: unruliness as the completion of personhood, not a perversion of it.3

She navigates the world with the swagger of a mediocre white man.

The stoner, slacker lifestyle, according to cultural critic Ari Spool, is “an accepted part of modern maleness.”8 Women, by contrast, have to go to college, get jobs, have kids in the limited biological time available to them: “there is not time for women to be slovenly and relax.”

not because women aren’t intrinsically capable of such lack of concern for what others think of them, but because they’ve been taught for so long that it’s the

primary barometer of one’s life.10

They’re presenting the grotesquerie of performing femininity.

According to this logic, men’s bodily functions are funny—but women’s bodies are fundamentally obscene.

But who needs romance when you have friendship with just as much texture and affection?

Operating without the male gaze frees women from self-consciousness,

A woman navigating the world with the confidence of a man is a beautiful, magnetic, and periodically unnerving sight to behold.

The women of Broad City aren’t horrified by their own bodies—but that doesn’t mean they can’t find them deeply hilarious.

The refusal to prioritize or achieve those things has been pathologized for years, and still sticks to the women of Broad City: part of the reason they’re “zany” or “unhinged” or “boundary-pushing,” to use the language of reviewers, is because they are, simply put, outside the gravitational sway of men.

The tendency to group Broad City with Girls thus highlights just how ideologically ill-equipped and inexperienced the industry is with narratives produced by and for women: “It’s like women in their 20s, you are all the same!”

It’s a tendency that reflects the age-old understanding that (white) men can contain multitudes, while members of every other group are pitted against themselves, as if there can be only one show about black families, or queer dudes, or, in the case of Broad City and Girls, young women.

In other words, they’re leaning in to their feelings—not because of societal expectations, but because they want to do what feels good.

At the end of season three, they are still gloriously at home in their unruliness, but they’re also diving deeper into what satisfaction and fulfillment might look like for each of them—an equation that might include boyfriends or babies or jobs but will, above all else, include each other.

the freedom to fuck around, the ability to act “like men,” or act like “the boss bitches we are in our minds”—without considering the ways other people are still excluded from doing so, is the height of white girl feminism.

Unruliness isn’t just calling attention to arbitrary expectations of how a woman should behave. It’s also a willingness to expect better for all other women—and better of oneself.

“The reason I stopped taking pictures like that was because I needed to prove myself. I needed for people to take me seriously. I needed for people to respect my craft. I’ve proven that I’m an MC. I’m a writer; I’m the real deal, so if I want to take sexy pictures, I can. I’m at the level in my career and in my life now where I can do whatever the hell I want to do.”2

“Every woman is multifaceted. Every woman has a switch, whether she’s going to be maternal, whether she’s going to be a man-eater, whether she has to kick ass, whether she has to be one of the boys, whether she has to show the guys that she’s just as smart or smarter, she’s just as talented or creative. Women suppress a lot of their sides.”

“Everyone knows I can go out and pick a dude and date him,” she told Out. “But I want to do what people think I can’t do, which is have the number 1 album in the country and be the first female rapper to sell albums like dudes in this day and age.”17

Respect!

To label her “too sexual” is to underestimate just how complicated women, and the pleasure and power they can take in their own bodies, can be, even if—especially if—that power and pleasure have historically been wrested from them.

Here, like with her videos, and her interviews, and her lyrics and her transformations, lies a simple yet highly provocative suggestion: that women are far more complicated than others have come to assume.

To put down a woman for something that men do, as if they’re children and I’m responsible, has nothing to do with you asking stupid questions, but you know that’s not just a stupid question.