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

by Anne Helen Petersen

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.

But that’s the hallmark of unruliness: by surpassing the boundaries of respectability, she was able to yak and tweet and brag loud enough, about topics and ideas in which women have a real stake, for others to hear it.

Unruliness can be liberating, but within our current cultural climate, it is also endlessly exhausting.

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. To refuse others’ understanding of yourself and your capabilities doesn’t just feel like self-determination: it’s moving from being the object in someone else’s narrative to the subject of one’s own.