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

by Anne Helen Petersen

When women stop reading, the novel will be dead. —IAN MCEWAN2

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.

Women make up around 80 percent of the fiction-buying public, making them an incredibly powerful

“Any woman who ever put pen to paper, or finger to laptop, has had to deal with sexism, discrimination and double standards, has had to fight harder than a man to get published, to get noticed, to get reviewed, to get profiled. I’m not saying that we all need to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but I wish that there was some recognition of what the real problem is. Chick lit is not the problem.”

Anything that makes you feel like you’re doing something smart, but you’re still pretty comfortable or unchallenged doing it, that’s midcult.

Dunham’s unclothed body is not what we typically see represented for our viewing pleasure. Instead, it’s a way to communicate character—and illuminate our unspoken understanding of which bodies are allowed to be naked in front of others and which ones should remain clothed.

The naked body is raw, without pretense, bare; the nude is nakedness refined: smoothed, proportional, pleasing.

As the director of her own nakedness, Dunham has helped create a different aesthetic of the unclothed body in popular culture, asserting that women’s bodies are worthy even when they are not arranged, distorted, or otherwise represented through and for the gaze of men.

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.

Clark argues that unlike a tiger, or a snowy landscape, which becomes art simply by being depicted as faithfully as possible, nakedness “does not move us to empathy, but to disillusion and dismay.”

“We are immediately disturbed by wrinkles, pouches, and other small imperfections,” Clark declared. Which is why the artist does not “wish to imitate” the naked figure, but to “perfect” 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.”

“The nude or semi-nude body may be beautiful,” the Code averred, but that “does not make its use in the films moral.”

As Rebecca Mead put it in a 2010 profile for The New Yorker, Dunham “does not have the body of a Girl Gone Wild.” She has “pale, ample thighs and a generous belly; greenish tattoos spiderweb her arms and back.”12 She is disproportional; imperfect; unsmooth—her body, represented on-screen, a “failed” piece of art.

Effortless slimness says, “I have no desires, not even food”—and that’s the height of power.

As Bordo demonstrates, the obsession, approximately since the 1980s, has less to do with the size of the body so much as its tautness.

It has far less to do with actually losing weight and far more to do with the quest for what Bordo calls “firm bodily margins.” Such successfully “normalized” bodies can vary somewhat in the size of the ass, the legs, or the breasts, but their beauty is rooted in their discipline, through either exercise or surgery.

The toned body, after all, requires even more work than the skinny one: it’s about constant self-improvement.

An untoned body, by this logic, indicates a woman who is either a failure—unable to discipline herself thoroughly—or someone who flaunts that imperative entirely, without a regard for the standards that dictate goodness or wellness.

“My mother understood, implicitly, the power of it. See these hips, these teeth, these eyebrows, these stockings that bunch and sag at the ankles? They’re worth capturing, holding on to forever. I’ll never be this young again. Or this lonely. Or this hairy. Come one, come all, to my private show.”

Dunham’s nudity isn’t “brave,” because, as Dunham herself explains, for it to be brave she would have to be afraid.

even in this moment of unruliness, each of these women’s power has a ceiling.

If spending this much time becoming deeply acquainted with these women’s work and reception has taught me one thing, it’s just how difficult and deeply disheartening it can be to be a woman in the public eye. All of these women are as imperfect as you or me, but when they say or do the wrong thing—or even say or do the right thing—the backlash can be swift, exacting, and cruel.

To be an unruly woman in the public eye is to always be inviting criticism—and constantly fortifying yourself against it.

To be an unruly woman today is to oscillate between the postures of fearlessness and self-doubt, between listening to the voices that tell a woman she is too much and one’s own, whispering and yelling I am already enough, and always have been. It is terrifying and liberating; it is lucrative and it is career-destroying; it is fashionable and it is gauche; it is shameful and it is redemptive. But it is also a mode of being that is endlessly electric.

And while every society, no matter how utopian, will always produce norms, and censor and shame those who fail or refuse them, these women’s prominence, economic prowess, and control may help accelerate the long historical march toward women wresting control of those norms, and expanding them to better reflect the ways of being that they find satisfying, nourishing, expansive, and radically inclusive.

Historically, it has taken very little to turn women against one another and even less to turn men, so anxious about the maintenance of power, against women who attempt to seize some modicum of it for themselves.

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.