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

by Anne Helen Petersen

Femininity cloaked power and strength, made it more palatable, less threatening.

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.

The privilege to fuck around intertwines with the privilege to only accept labor that makes you feel good.

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

‘Does a woman have any worth past youth and beauty?’ I believe they do, and I will fight that fight until I die, but I think a lot of women feel they have to give up.”16

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.