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

by Anne Helen Petersen

Talk too much, you’re a slut. Resist the president, you’re a hag. Refuse to disappear, you’re the problem

They provide irrefutable evidence that our society does not value, trust, or elevate women the same way it values, trusts, or elevates men.

Unruliness has always been about making people uncomfortable, about making people talk, about challenging the status quo.

“I’m not asking you to like my body. I’m just asking you to let me be me.

And the longer marriage and children are delayed (or refused altogether), the longer women have to explore or switch careers, or to experience weekends and non-work times not as time to serve others’ needs, but their own, or none at all. The more time they have, to put it bluntly, to fuck around.

A woman navigating the world with the confidence of a man is a beautiful, magnetic, and periodically unnerving sight to behold.

sometimes she tries so hard to not be racist that it’s actually racist—it’s

“I don’t like to put a label on myself, because then people will tear that apart.”