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

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.