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

by Anne Helen Petersen

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

Just because you spend years analyzing unruliness doesn’t mean you’re not subject to the trenchant cultural imperative to shun, shame, and reject it.

it’s one thing to admire such abrasiveness and disrespect for the status quo in someone else; it’s quite another to take that risk in one’s own life.

in part because that answer is less dependent on the women themselves and more on the way we, as cultural consumers, decide to talk and think about them.

distinguished by the burgeoning ideologies of postracism and postfeminism, which suggested that the goals of the civil rights and feminist movements had been achieved, so why should we worry about all this political correctness? Within this cultural logic, it was unnecessarily inflammatory to bring up issues of race—it was impolite, in poor taste.

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.

will continue to be threatening until the standards of beauty are decentered from those of the white upper class.

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

She should be everything, which means she should be nothing.

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.

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.

requires a posture of possibility. You must strive to understand; your understanding may not match anyone else’s.

absent recognition by national awards organizations or review sections like The New York Times’s, there’s no way for a woman, writing about women’s lives, to unyoke herself from a classification as chick lit, mass culture, less-than, not literature.

Or, as art critic John Berger puts it, “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others and not recognized for oneself.”6 The

Dunham’s nudity isn’t “brave,” because, as Dunham herself explains, for it to be brave she would have to be afraid.

A backlash, however, is coming. One has accompanied every period of feminist and unruly advance, and harbingers of the next one are already here for all to see: most vividly in the misogynist rhetoric of supporters of Donald Trump and the move to curtail women’s control over their reproductive rights, but also in the anger over “ruining” male childhoods by rebooting a movie with a female cast, the victimhood running through Gamergate, and the general hysteria over “PC culture,” which so precisely mirrors the feminist backlash of the 1990s. From our current vantage point, that backlash is so easy to disavow. But its currents are strong, capable of cloaking themselves with the sort of persuasiveness that even the most enlightened among us begin to heed. Historically, it has taken very little to turn women against one another and even less to turn men, so anxious about the maintenance of power, against women who attempt to seize some modicum of it for themselves.

This book is a celebration, but it’s also a warning: right now, it’s cool to be unruly and, by extension, easy to understand both its appeal and its progressive power. But the best way to honor and accelerate the project of unruliness is to refuse to participate in its demonization, even when—especially when—the cultural tide threatens to turn against it. Because unruliness isn’t a single, easily disavowed decision, or an article of clothing one can take off and discard with the season. It’s an attitude shared by so many women of history, so many women of this book, and so many others reading it: a hope that someday, the only rules a woman will have to abide by are those she sets for herself.