More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 7 - December 13, 2018
the history of feminism is two steps forward, one step back—so how can we make that step back smaller?
Talk too much, you’re a slut. Resist the president, you’re a hag. Refuse to disappear, you’re the problem.
Unruliness has always been about making people uncomfortable, about making people talk, about challenging the status quo.
ugly truth: that the difference between cute, acceptable unruliness and unruliness that results in ire is often as simple as the color of a woman’s skin, whom she prefers to sleep with, and her proximity to traditional femininity.
Through this lens, unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. 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.
unruliness can spark a firestorm, but it can also scorch the very ground on which they tread.
they could spark feelings of fascination and repulsion at the same time,
it’s one thing to admire such abrasiveness and disrespect for the status quo in someone else; it’s quite another to take that risk in one’s own life.
“The truth is that no white player would have received such a raft of criticism for being different from—or the same as—everybody else. The truth is that there has been racism in tennis, and it has been directed at the Williamses, although it has rarely been explicit. Rather, it has been conveyed by innuendo and insinuation, and in a subtle disproportion in the way people respond to them, alternating between vitriol and over-congratulation.”
Femininity cloaked power and strength, made it more palatable, less threatening.
“The smile, the confidence, the way she carried herself—she plays like she knows she belongs”—her
“I’m not asking you to like my body. I’m just asking you to let me be me. Because I’m going to influence a girl who does look like me, and I want her to feel good about herself.”
As critical race scholar Brittney C. Cooper puts it: “White anger is entertaining; Black anger must be contained.”
“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,” she writes.
“The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine.”
widely held American attitude—one that fears and pathologizes fatness, even as it promotes the rhetoric of self-acceptance and self-confidence. Fat is ugly, and dangerous, and an epidemic sweeping the country, this logic suggests—but you should love yourself!
In Western society, fatness is interpreted as failure: a failure of control, of societal expectations, of will.
Studies have shown that fat people have a harder time getting admitted into top colleges, landing jobs, and receiving promotions; to be fat in America is, in many ways, to be a second-class citizen.
how pervasive the cult of thinness is in Hollywood: even if the roles that go to thin people aren’t great—and you objectively do not want them—you still want the sort of body that gets them.
By amplifying characteristics of femininity or masculinity, it highlights their absurdity, their arbitrariness, and just how easily they can be applied and abandoned.
“A woman does the same thing and people are actually offended,”
she’s called Hollywood sexism “an intense sickness” in which female actors who aren’t “skipping along in high heels” are branded “unattractive bitch(es),”
women are “trained to some degree to, you know, mind your manners, don’t say this, don’t do that. I think as women you’re taught not to trust your gut, not to be rude.”
“She’s living proof that self-acceptance and perseverance can make any dream come true.”
She’s not intimidating, yet she’s aspirational, because she’s a beautiful woman, but she’s a real woman.”
“I believe it matters how you treat people,”
“I want to be healthy. I don’t have a goal weight. I’ll know when I feel good.”
“Even when someone gets to looking like she should be so proud of herself, instead she’s like ‘I could be another three pounds less; I could be a little taller and have bigger lips.’ Where does it end?”
Anger, after all, makes other people angry.
“Seventy percent of women in the United States are size 14 or above,” she told Refinery29, “and that’s technically ‘plus-size,’ so you’re taking your biggest category of people and telling them, ‘You’re not really worthy.’ I find that very strange.”
fat people receive vastly different treatment than non-fat people.
When McCarthy begins to lose weight, she disrupts that logic: she’s “fixing” the problem, but doesn’t that underline a lack of pride in her size?
it’s possible to both change your body and continue to take pride in it—but
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.
Still, the fact remains: thin or fat, young or old, a female star simply has to do more, gross more, be more in order to be valued in the same way as her male counterparts.
If a dude did any of these things, it’d be called “epic” or “legendary” or maybe just a “casual hang” with the guys. When a woman does it, it’s unruliness in the highest degree.
To “have it all” generally meant laboring nearly constantly: the first shift at work, the so-called second shift at home.
The privilege to fuck around intertwines with the privilege to only accept labor that makes you feel good.
Smoking weed is unruly not because it’s illegal, but because it makes women care less about everything in general and societal expectations in particular.
Men have been getting stoned for decades, but when a woman admits to getting high and liking it—as Jennifer Aniston did in 2000—it’s viewed as “tarnishing” her image.
The stoner, slacker lifestyle, according to cultural critic Ari Spool, is “an accepted part of modern maleness.”8 Women, by contrast, have to go to college, get jobs, have kids in the limited biological time available to them: “there is not time for women to be slovenly and relax.”
Slate’s Willa Paskin describes that spirit as “IDGAF,” or “I don’t give a fuck,” and points to just how rare it is to see a woman inhabit it: not because women aren’t intrinsically capable of such lack of concern for what others think of them, but because they’ve been taught for so long that it’s the primary barometer of one’s life.10
According to this logic, men’s bodily functions are funny—but women’s bodies are fundamentally obscene.
Operating without the male gaze frees women from self-consciousness
A woman navigating the world with the confidence of a man is a beautiful, magnetic, and periodically unnerving sight to behold.
no male shows are ever grouped into a category as being so similar just because there are guys on them.”
“If it’s not a white dude thing, it’s compared to whatever group you’re in.”
It’s a tendency that reflects the age-old understanding that (white) men can contain multitudes, while members of every other group are pitted against themselves, as if there can be only one show about black families, or queer dudes, or, in the case of Broad City and Girls, young women.
In other words, they’re leaning in to their feelings—not because of societal expectations, but because they want to do what feels good.
“great comedians don’t fold and sulk when people raise questions—they just make better bits and bolder, more ambitious jokes.”
