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“Too much power” is code for “as much power as white men,”
It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.
Jane Fonda helped popularize the lean, athletic body over the course of the eighties and nineties, and the rise of Pilates and yoga over the past twenty years has ushered in a new standard for the “ideal” feminine body: skinny but toned. A flat stomach, defined calves, nicely toned triceps. Muscular, but not too muscular; strong, but still undeniably feminine, lest it lose its attractiveness—the thing that women are taught to value most in the world, even above athletic dominance.
Like so many women of the time, she often wore short-sleeve T-shirts that concealed the muscles she’d developed as a result of her powerful serve. Femininity cloaked power and strength, made it more palatable, less threatening.
“I represent ladies who want to be healthy and not starve themselves.”
As critical race scholar Brittney C. Cooper puts it: “White anger is entertaining; Black anger must be contained.”
She is change manifest, which is to say she’s never not a threat: the most unruly, and essential, of women.
“For black people, there is an unspoken script that demands the humble absorption of racist assaults, no matter the scale, because whites need to believe that it’s no big deal,”
“The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine.”
Imagine Serena not as an aggressive, aggrieved participant in a sport that struggled to make room for her, but as one who forced her way in and made space for all who followed.
good fat body, then, is one that’s attempting—confidently! with love!—to erase itself.
God this is so true.
The political power of drag resides in its ability to draw attention to just how performative gender can be.
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.
When middle-class women moved into the workplace, it was celebrated as women’s “liberation”; in practice, it meant that women simply doubled their labor.
The privilege to fuck around intertwines with the privilege to only accept labor that makes you feel good.
According to this logic, men’s bodily functions are funny—but women’s bodies are fundamentally obscene.
woman navigating the world with the confidence of a man is a beautiful, magnetic, and periodically unnerving sight to behold.
How she arranges her hair, the type of makeup she uses, the quality of her complexion—all these are signs, not of what she is ‘really’ like, but of how she asks to be treated by others, especially men.
the most desirable form is that of a fourteen-year-old girl, down to the perky breasts, the lean arms, the slender, athletic legs.
“Womanly” hips and ass might be theoretically fetishized, but they’re desirable only when the rest of the body remains that of the girl.
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.
“There are very few women willing to fight the idea that beauty is the highest currency.
When she writes on her blog that “for me pregnancy is the worst experience of my life,” she’s not just “keeping it real,” as she proclaims at the beginning of the paragraph; she’s working to mainstream the truly unruly idea that pregnancy—and, by extension, even motherhood—is not the pinnacle, or even defining purpose, of every woman’s life.1
To be pregnant in public was in poor taste—unsophisticated, trashy, unbecoming, obscene.
for most people, fatness means a harder time getting a job, garnering respect, or navigating the physical world; for celebrities, it means all of those things, plus incessant public ridicule.
It’s the sort of contradictory messaging a pregnant woman receives: you’re hot, but on the border of obscene; you’re perfect, but you’re huge; don’t feel bad about yourself, but your thin body is better.
As novelist and cultural critic Hilary Mantel explains, “Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”
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.
“every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you,”
“bitch” as a word “we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men . . . 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.”
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.”
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.
“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
“presidential campaigns are built to showcase the stereotypically male trait of standing in front of a room speaking confidently.”
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
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.
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.
The trope of the accepting family is crucial: it suggests that trans people can and do integrate seamlessly into society (in school, in the workplace, in the family) and, in so doing, suggests that society doesn’t need to change—trans people just need to fit into it.
“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.”
There’s a hierarchy within the world of books, deeply rooted in accumulated understandings of class, commerce, and gender. It goes something like this: The more popular, the more marketable, the more visible and readable a book is, the less worth it has within the cultural hierarchy.
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne famously referred to female writers as the “damned mob of scribbling women.” Scribbling, like children; mob, as in unruly: a distraction and a disturbance.
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.
Man, this hits you squarely between the eyes.
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.”
To retreat with your own thoughts and words is a privilege that few women, no matter their class, can afford—even
few things enrage, confuse, and repulse audiences more than the suggestion that the primary visual purpose of a woman’s body is not the pleasure of men.
Effortless slimness says, “I have no desires, not even food”—and that’s the height of power.
This ideal was internalized most powerfully by women, whose presence and appearance remained a means for their husbands or fathers to demonstrate their wealth and class.
