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March 13 - March 23, 2023
Because these women and their unruliness matter—and the best way to show their gravity and power and influence is to refuse to shut up about why they do.
The problem with Serena was that she was denigrating both America and one of its last remaining “respectable” (read: white) sports, bringing it down to the level of basketball, where players regularly confront their refs, or football, where players rebuke, ignore, or otherwise refuse to play nice with the press.
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.
“The thing is, if that is the most interesting thing about me, I need to go have a lavender farm in Minnesota and give this up. There has to be something more.”51 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.
The privilege to fuck around intertwines with the privilege to only accept labor that makes you feel good.
But who needs romance when you have friendship with just as much texture and affection?
“These girls are horny, but not under the male gaze,” Glazer told Out. “They’re horny, period. Just starting from the vagina, not starting from some man looking at them.”19
A woman navigating the world with the confidence of a man is a beautiful, magnetic, and periodically unnerving sight to behold.
The willingness to contemplate the ramifications of these freedoms is by no means an exclusively female trait. Yet the refusal to fall into the easy posture of denial or defensiveness, like so many comedians under fire, requires a sort of bravery, of brazenness. 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 tendency to label Minaj “too slutty” or sexually explicit is a symptom of a much larger anxiety: how to process a woman, and a black woman in particular, who has taken control of her body, her formidable talents, and the way they are marketed, monetized, and received.
Black bodies were figured as more “earthy,” more animal, more primal, more sexual—and, despite the black woman’s historical subjugation, more free, more open. In this way, the black female body was made available for consumption and titillation, yet still distanced from the (pure, virginal) white body.
the black female body gains attention only when it is synonymous with accessibility, availability, and when it is sexually deviant.”
If women of all races have been objectified for centuries, what happens when one decides to do it herself? Is it liberating—and if she thinks it’s liberating, has she simply accepted the ideology of the oppressor? And how do the questions of empowerment function differently when applied to white women and women of color?
“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.”
“I stand for girls wanting to be sexy and dance, but also having a strong sense of themselves. If you got a big ol’ butt? Shake it! Who cares? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be graduating from college. When I’m twerking and having fun, I still want to instill self-worth in young girls.”
As Feministing columnist Mychal Denzel Smith put it, “whenever black women own their own sense of sexuality and it appears to not be controlled by
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.
that women are far more complicated than others have come to assume.
Makeup is central to this transformation: a teenager who wears makeup declares her status as a sexual object; the grown woman who doesn’t wear makeup signals classiness; the aging woman who wears too much makeup becomes gaudy in her insistence on her continued objecthood.1
The crafting of the face is a billion-dollar industry because there’s actually only one truly acceptable face to create: that of “the girl.” The girl’s face is always dewy, unblemished, and unwrinkled, her eyes bright, her forehead uncreased.
the ideology that yokes a woman’s worth to her beauty—instead of her accomplishments, or her intelligence, or her integrity—has been ossified through centuries of patriarchy.
that pregnancy is something they have to conceal and disguise. It takes the courage of a woman as modern and innovative as Demi Moore to cast aside the conventions of traditional beauty and declare that there is nothing more glorious than the sight of a woman carrying a child.”
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.
“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. And that’s the core of Clinton’s unruliness: she has demanded the same stature, power, and attention as a man.
Journalist and DC insider Sally Quinn added that “there’s just something about her that pisses people off.” Some linked it to her refusal to schmooze: she simply didn’t have the right people over for dinner enough. Hillary herself said, “I apparently remind some people of their mother-in-law or their boss or something.”
A mother-in-law, a critical boss, an ex-wife, a nagging wife, a nagging mother—all coded language for an undesirable woman who asks for something, who threatens dominance in some way.
Campaign consultant Mandy Grunwald believed women were threatened by the path Hillary had chosen: “They’re looking at a woman who is close to their age and made totally different choices,” she explained. Hillary “forces them to ask questions about themselves and the choices they’ve made that they don’t necessarily want to ask.”
The more Clinton performed like a woman “standing by her man,” the easier it was for America to like her.
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.
But if charisma comes from the divine, it is divinity given almost uniquely to men—at least in political form.
But she was still a woman: as Alter explained, “she lacks a critical asset. Male candidates can establish a magnetic and often sexual connection to women in the audience.” Her speeches were measured and informative, but watching Obama speak felt like getting saved at church.
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.
“Even those of us who didn’t usually concern ourselves with gender-centric matters began to realize that when it comes to women, we are not post-anything.”27 Over the next eight years, the truth of that claim would become alarmingly clear: in renewed attempts to legislate women’s reproductive health, in the explosion of online harassment of women, in the rhetoric that would continue to hover around Clinton’s campaign for president, and in her defeat in 2016 by an outspoken misogynist who vows to roll back women’s reproductive rights.
“Sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting”—a
“we don’t know how a female president should sound. We’ve never had one before . . . And men’s voices are so much more familiar.”
When people describe Clinton’s voice as “screeching” or “shrill,” they’re not actually talking about her voice, but about what the voice of a leader should sound like—a voice that remains, to most ears, incredibly masculine.
explained. “In other words, only a man’s voice sounds like it tells important truths.”33
More likely to vote for her—not assured. Because as the election results underlined, the majority of white women—the very women some might expect to identify most strongly with Clinton—voted for Trump.
As Klein underlines, “presidential campaigns are built to showcase the stereotypically male trait of standing in front of a room speaking confidently.”38 When Clinton attempted to speak confidently in front of a room of people, she was called shrill and judged a failure. No matter of practice or training could change that.
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.
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.
By making people forget that someone is trans, it also means they don’t have to confront the anxiety, fear, or anger that arises when someone destabilizes the binary understanding of gender.
The less a queer person challenges the gender binary, the more assimilated they are into straight behaviors and lifestyles, the more acceptable and palatable they become.
Jorgensen “framed her transition as the medical correction of a mistake made by nature,” and both included acknowledgment of the sentiment as a child, a feeling of “not being at home” in one’s body, and a desire to fully transition from one gender to another.4
As sportswriter Buzz Bissinger summarizes in the profile that accompanied Jenner’s debut, “He adorned the front of the Wheaties box. He drank orange juice for Tropicana and took pictures for Minolta. He gave speeches about the 48 hours of his Olympic win all over the country to enthralled audiences. He was red, white, and blue. He was Mom and apple pie with a daub of vanilla ice cream for extra deliciousness in a country desperate for such an image. He had a tireless work ethic. He had beaten the Commie bastards. He was America.”7
“Caitlyn still seems to be laboring under the impression that trans people owe mainstream society a debt, or an apology, for embracing their true selves—or at least that they must jump neatly back in one gender-normalized box having jumped out of another.”
Feministing writer Jos Truitt puts it, “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.”
Yet with visibility comes hierarchies: of those who can be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vanity Fair and those whom no one wants to photograph; of those who can afford to disappear and return fully transitioned versus those who must wait for years; of those whose family, friends, and cultural and work spaces remain a support structure versus those whose are rejected; of those who desire to occupy the gender binary as compared with those who ignore or purposefully disrupt it.
“So often, visibility uses the lens of respectability to determine who, even in the most vulnerable communities, should be seen and heard. I believe that, through the filter of visibility, those of us most at risk to state violence become even more vulnerable to that violence.”14
Boylan says, “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.
