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

by Anne Helen Petersen

As Bordo explains, “the control of female appetite for food is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger—for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification—be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited.”

Put differently, hunger has become the antithesis of “good” femininity: to eat, to desire, to be unsatisfied is to be a “bad woman.”

For Dunham, the outlines of desire are endlessly mutable and dynamic—and, as a result, have far less legislating control over women’s bodies. And that idea—even more than the radical notion that a man who looks like a Ken doll wouldn’t desire his female equivalent—is truly discombobulating.

the imperative against unruliness might be largely created by men, but as these chapters have shown, it’s often enforced by women, whether in the form of mothers, best friends, peers, producers, or women reproducing judgment on unruly celebrities.