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

by Anne Helen Petersen

She bursts through the glossy veneer of the celebrity industrial complex, wrests control of the narrative, calls bullshit on the rhetoric and mechanisms that would frame her as unruly, acting out, overly aggressive. Because Minaj is not, in fact, too slutty—or too rude, or too weird, or too manipulative. She simply has something that’s long been inaccessible for female celebrities, and black ones in particular: total control.

In premodern (read: agrarian) society, actual age was far less important than one’s capability. Your physical capacity (and gender) largely dictated your labor, your value, and your place in society, not the number of years you’d been on the earth. The development of modern society and the separation of certain classes of men and women from constant physical labor—along with the development of the standardized calendar, and the cult of the individual—made one’s precise age more important.

All aging bodies are abject, but women’s bodies are especially so—there are more areas, the breasts and neck and butt in particular, to sag, disappoint, and signal their lack of viability.

Female celebrities are thus forced to walk “an incredibly narrow and precarious tightrope,” as celebrity scholars Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn explain, in which “the aesthetic and discursive space in which one can age ‘well’ is severely delimited, as well as contradictory, capricious, and subject to change.”4 Work out, but don’t get arms like Madonna’s; work hard to keep your body ageless, but make that labor invisible. Put simply: you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t. Try too hard, and you’re disgusting; don’t try at all, and you’re invisible.

In this way, Madonna became one of the primary architects of the apparatus that is now rejecting her.

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.

And while she conceives of her work today as kicking down the door for female musicians to come, she hasn’t sought to collaborate with those, like Jennifer Lopez, or Gwen Stefani, on the cusp of “old age,” instead opting to associate with Ariana Grande or Katy Perry,

the “cute celebrity pregnancy,” Kardashian effectively called attention to the constrictive, regressive norms of how women, celebrity or not, are now expected to “perform” pregnancy in public.

Put differently, industries weren’t yet selling the idea of the “cute” pregnancy—or the products to maintain it.

The Kardashians became the apotheosis of what it means to be a celebrity today: instead of deflecting surveillance of the body and the personal, they embraced and exploited it.

“I feel like I’ve turned into a different person,” she said, just before putting on the bikini captured on the cover of Us. “I just feel like a huge roly-poly . . . It’s like an alien inside of you.” In the next episode, the rest of the family discusses Kim’s inability to enjoy herself at the breakfast table: “She’s so not happy,” Kris says. “I mean pregnancy isn’t for everyone,” Khloé responds. “It doesn’t seem like she’s enjoying hers.”

Even if the concept of “perfect” is wobbly and contradictory, it remains the pregnant woman’s goal. A perfect pregnancy style, a perfect weight gain, a perfect attitude toward pregnancy. When a woman is unable to achieve that perfection, or refuses its pursuit altogether, she’s shamed: if not by her immediate circle of friends and family, whose shaming is often cloaked in the language of “advice,” then by the representations of “ideal pregnancy” that, over the course of the last thirty years, have become regular fixtures of our media diet.

The pregnant woman has more “freedom” in the public sphere than ever before—and yet women are experiencing the largest war against their reproductive freedoms in more than fifty years. It’s contradictory, of course, but that’s the guiding structure of any ideology: no matter how emancipatory it might seem for the pregnant body to be visible, that visibility means subjugation to regimes of respectability and regulation under patriarchy. As Cramer points out, it was no coincidence that as audiences watched Kardashian’s preparations for labor, Wendy Davis was filibustering against anti-choice laws in the Texas state legislature. When the body becomes public property, as the pregnant body has indubitably become, it not only liberates the populace at large to comment and cast judgment on it, but the (male-dominated) legislature to institute legal controls over it.23

in which the most famous woman on the planet declares that every body, every pregnancy is different—and in which the business of being a woman in public, even with an audience of millions, still remains that woman’s business alone.

She should be assertive but not bossy, feminine but not prissy, experienced but not condescending, fashionable but not superficial, forceful but not shrill. Put simply: she should be masculine, but not too masculine; feminine, but not too feminine. She should be everything, which means she should be nothing.

Aka, how to be woman in the workforce. #ladyboss

it was false hope, like celebratory fireworks that distracted from the fact that the house was getting torched.

“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.

“I’m a big believer in women making choices that are right for them,” Clinton had continued. “The work that I have done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed at trying to assure that women can make the choices they should make—whether it’s a full-time career, full-time motherhood, or some combination . . .”4

People could deal with Hillary Clinton as a resilient wife, or a stately woman on the cover of Vogue. It was when she grasped for actual power that the nation recoiled.

We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it. We use it for a woman who doesn’t back down from confrontation.”20 Calling Clinton a bitch, then, is a way to shame and silence any woman who dares step out of line.

The implication that Clinton would emasculate men was an anxiety-producing one, but it was also so bald-faced as to feel absurd: if we’re past the age of sexism, after all, then men shouldn’t feel threatened by a powerful women. Comments about her castrating power underlined that neither theory was actually true.

But if charisma comes from the divine, it is divinity given almost uniquely to men—at least in political form.

It was one thing to dislike Clinton. It was quite another to ignore how her treatment was symptomatic of deep-seated, if often well-camouflaged, misogyny.

“I was taken back to a moment in my career many years ago when a top CNN executive explained that for on-air delivery to resonate as authoritative and credible it should come in a low tone,” CNN’s Frida Ghitis explained. “In other words, only a man’s voice sounds like it tells important truths.”33

Clinton had been gaslighted about the sexism levied at her for decades. Now she was accused not only of exploiting it, but of creating it herself.

Klein found that Clinton’s flaw was listening:

The capacity to listen and contemplate has rendered her a formidable legislator and statesman—yet, crucially, has done little to change her aptitude at campaigning.

When a woman fails, in essence, to be a man, she also fails as a candidate—if she tries to emulate masculine behaviors, she’s too severe; if she leans in to feminine ones, she’s simply unsuited for office.39

It’s Clinton’s defining character trait: her understanding of her worth is so strong that she’s refused, at every point in her life and career, to let men define her.

was ultimately a story of a woman so driven and sure of her value that the former president, a man of similar ambition and intellect, had to find a way to fit into her life, not the other way around.

In the end, matriarchy isn’t the fear. Rather, it’s the idea that women will define their own value, and their own futures, on their own terms instead of by terms men have laid out—put differently, that each gender, and each individual, will have the power to determine their own destiny. To slightly modify the old bumper sticker, it’s the radical notion that both men and women are people.

It will take more than just one election to alter the integral qualities of the “good president”—qualities that, once altered, have the potential to affect the way that all women, even those far from the political playing field, are evaluated in positions of power. But that doesn’t mean that Clinton’s loss is a step back. She punched the glass ceiling so hard that the task of shattering it has become far less formidable. There will certainly be backlash; it will again expose the ugliest, most enduringly misogynist aspects of our society. But such are the wages of change—the

Some believe there’s little progress to be made in fighting for the right to join an oppressive, exclusionary institution instead of forcing that institution to change.

Her Vanity Fair cover, in which she sits coyly in lingerie in a corner, is a textbook manifestation of the male gaze at work.

the ultimate sign of transnormativity for trans people is “an overall desire to be ‘just like’ their cisgender peers and view the resolution of their difference as a sign of success.”9 And Jenner is nothing if not a winner.

Even outside of the pressures of the media, Jenner may have desired to embody womanhood the way that she does. But she was also surrounded by messages, explicit and implicit, from non-trans people and from the few “positive” trans representations in popular culture, that to pass, to fully integrate, was to succeed.

“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.”

“You can’t hate someone whose story you know.” You can disagree with them, you can have different goals, but it’s far, far more difficult to hate them—and act, legislate, and speak in ways that are transphobic—if trans people are humanized on-screen.

Why representation of all kinds in the media is important

Because when hate and fear become the status quo, the simple act of trying to understand others who don’t live and act the same as you do—an attitude Jenner has now modeled for millions—becomes a profoundly unruly act.

👏👏👏

Women make up around 80 percent of the fiction-buying public, making them an incredibly powerful market force.4 They’re just not buying the right books—at least according to a pervasive and problematic cultural assumption. The right books are “difficult”: experimental, impenetrable, male. They get written up in prestigious book reviews; they win awards that place a tasteful gold stamp in their corner. Their authors don’t blog or tweet about them, because they don’t blog or tweet. They take decades to write. They’re released in hardcover, the robust carapace of high literature. They occupy the rarefied air of high art. And the majority, but certainly not all, of the authors of these books are men.

Yep

And while even Franzen can admit that the issue “is important,” he also believes Weiner is an “unfortunate person to have as a spokesperson.”7 Unfortunate because she writes stories that fulfill a specific psychological function for women living under postfeminism, unfortunate because her books are too commercial and their covers too pastel, unfortunate because she spends too much time on Twitter, unfortunate because she won’t let Franzen off the hook for his deeply sexist understanding of how an author should present the labor and purpose of authorship. But mostly unfortunate because she doesn’t know her place. And that, more than the request for the Times and other publications to devote more thoughtful energy to books like hers, is the ultimate in literary unruliness.

Amen

The rigor, complexity, and alienation that attend the avant-garde ensure that only a certain sort of person, with a certain set of class privileges, will like it—which effectively reinforces its exclusivity and importance. This understanding of mass versus high culture also pivots on the experience of consumption: it doesn’t matter what the actual content is so much as the attitude, and reaction, one has to it. You approach a movie like National Treasure or a novel like The Da Vinci Code with the understanding that you’ll “get it”—its humor, its pathos, its purpose—and everyone else will “get it” in a similar manner. Going to a Mahler symphony or watching an experimental film, by contrast, requires a posture of possibility. You must strive to understand; your understanding may not match anyone else’s.

Anything that makes you feel like you’re doing something smart, but you’re still pretty comfortable or unchallenged doing it, that’s midcult. Time magazine is midcult, as is Game of Thrones. Portlandia is midcult; Downton Abbey is midcult. So is NPR and orchestras playing Led Zeppelin and The Old Man and the Sea and nature shows narrated by David Attenborough. Macdonald describes a midcult success as something that “has been praised by critics who should know better, and has been popular not so much with the masses as with the educated classes.”

He sounds like a snob with a stick up his butt.

Of course complexity is better than simplicity; of course you should qualify your enjoyment of anything that is not on the highest rung as a “guilty pleasure”—as if you were momentarily afflicted with bad taste and, as such, risk outing yourself as not just less intelligent, but less deserving of your own class.

If we authenticate and declare our worth and class in no small part through the objects we consume, then labeling the objects consumed by women as “less than” effectively delegitimizes and devalues women’s place in the world.

Amen, this is so on point

he was clearly suffering from a case of taste anxiety.

Intentionally or not, he articulated that the makeup of the readership, coupled with its commercial success, would change the value of his work.15

Franzen would go on to receive an estimated $1.5 million in royalties: for all of his kvetching about losing readers, he’d gained hundreds of thousands.16

“It does seem a little invidious of [Franzen] to want to have it both ways,” Bloom said. “To want the benefits of it and not jeopardize his high aesthetic standing.”17

Exactly.

“Literature, by contrast, grants us access to countless new cultures, places, and inner lives. Where chick lit reduces the complexity of human experience, literature increases our awareness of other perspectives and paths. Literature employs carefully crafted language to expand our reality, instead of beating us over the head with cliches that promote narrow world views. Chick lit shuts down our consciousness. Literature expands our imaginations.”25

Ugh 😒