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

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.

an 1818 review of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein explained, “The writer of it is, we understand, female . . . we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”

“Is anyone shocked?” Picoult tweeted. “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t male literary darlings.” Weiner’s addition was a variation on the idea she’d been articulating for years—“When a man writes about family and feelings, it’s literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same subjects, it’s romance, or a beach book.”

But women’s relation to writing has long been shaped by different forces: for many, if not most, part of the joy of writing was how its profits enabled, and continue to enable, women to determine their own destiny—untethered to a man. Writing, in other words, as a form of metaphorical and financial independence.

As Beth Driscoll points out, “For Franzen, mass media is a kind of noise that interferes with legitimate literary practices. It is also a mechanism for the dilution of literary quality.” He’s nostalgic for “the days when cultural gatekeeping occurred out of sight, away from the public forums of the internet and Twitter.”

“The overall pleasant evening has led me to the painful realization that I’ve spent 15 years insisting that books like mine deserve a place on the shelf, and maybe I don’t entirely believe it myself. Why else was I so willing to give credence to the naysayers and have trouble hearing the readers who said my books gave them comfort, kept them entertained, made them feel less alone?”51

part of the difficult, essential work of unruliness is shaking the status quo so thoroughly, so persistently, so loudly that everyone—even the very women behind that agitation, many of whom have internalized the understandings they fight so tirelessly against—can see their value within it.

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 process of representation is from subject to object—and, nearly without exception, through the brush, hands, or eyes of men.

instead of spending time degrading ourselves for falling short of the very narrow understanding of what types of bodies are worthy of desire—and, by extension, value—we could be thinking about things that make us feel good, or anything at all, really, that isn’t rooted in shame at how our bodies don’t look like someone else’s.

Miles claims that representations of the unclothed female body have long been a means of manifesting “male frustration and limitation”—what man desires and what he cannot have have been inscribed, throughout the history of the Western world, in terms of sin, sex, and death.

a woman only becomes unruly, after all, when she crosses a societally prescribed line of what “proper” femininity looks like.

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.