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

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ANNE HELEN PETERSEN received her PhD in media studies from the University of Texas, where she studied the industrial history of the gossip industry. Today, she writes about culture, celebrity, and feminism for BuzzFeed News. Her first book, Scandals of Classic Hollywood, was featured in The Boston Globe, Time, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, Bitch, the New York Post, and The Rumpus. She lives in Brooklyn.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Anne Helen Petersen

I N T R O D U C T I O N

On November 8, 2016, I woke up early and said, to no one in particular, “I’m so excited to vote for our first female president!” I wasn’t alone in this sentiment: the entire city of New York seemed to vibrate with anticipation that day. Walking back from my polling place, I saw a mom with her three young daughters, all dressed in Hillary Clinton pantsuits. At the corner of Clinton and President Streets in Brooklyn, dozens of people were taking selfies. On the subway, a stranger saw my voting sticker and said, “Thank you for doing your civic duty!” Some sites predicted as small as a 1 percent chance of Trump winning. The day’s outcome seemed assured.

Fast-forward twelve hours. I’m sitting at the BuzzFeed office in Manhattan, where the tone has taken an abrupt turn from excitement to panic. During the month leading up to the election, I had spoken to hundreds of women at Trump rallies—many of whom overflowed with hatred for Clinton. They joined the shouts to “lock her up” that echoed through the rallies; they wore shirts emblazoned with “Monica Sucks, Hillary Swallows.” Statistically, these women were a minority. But they had tapped into a larger reservoir of dislike, distrust, and repulsion that, as the election results flowing into the office were gradually making clear, had mobilized against Clinton.

I cease my frantic refreshing of Twitter and stare blankly ahead. A plastic cup of white wine grows warm beside me. Donald Trump’s win becomes probable, then certain. My phone lights up.

“I’m so sorry to do this,” my editor says, “but we need you to write something.”

I had expected a relaxing, joyful rest of the week. I was exhausted from weeks reporting on the road. I could have cried. But instead, I opened up a new document, writing: This Is How Much America Hates Women.

Not all women, of course. Just women like Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, who’d questioned Trump about his history with women during the primary debates. Women like former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, who’d dared to gain weight. Women like Elizabeth Warren, who simply won’t shut up, or Rosie O’Donnell, with whom Trump had feuded for years. Women like the dozen who’ve accused him of sexual impropriety and/or assault, and Clinton herself, whom he’d referred to as a “nasty woman.”

In other words, unruly women—the type who incite Trump’s ire, and whom millions of voters have decided they can degrade and dismiss, simply because they question, interrogate, or otherwise challenge the status quo. Of course, there have been unruly women for as long as there have been boundaries of what constitutes acceptable “feminine” behavior: women who, in some way, step outside the boundaries of good womanhood, who end up being labeled too fat, too loud, too slutty, too whatever characteristic women are supposed to keep under control. The hatred directed toward the unruly women of the 2016 campaign is simply an extension of the anxiety that’s accumulated around this type of woman for centuries.

Which is why Trump’s defeat would’ve felt like such a victory for unruly women everywhere: a mandate that this type of demeaning, dehumanizing behavior toward women is simply not acceptable, particularly from the president of the United States. Instead, Trump’s victory signals the beginning of a backlash that has been quietly brewing for years, as unruly women of various forms have come to dominate the cultural landscape.

And while the unruly woman is under threat, she isn’t going anywhere: Clinton, after all, won the popular vote by more than two million votes, and the election has mobilized untold numbers of women to protect their rights and those of others. Trump’s America feels unsafe for so many; the future of the nation seems uncertain. But unruliness—in its many manifestations, small and large, in action, in representation, in language—feels more important, more necessary, than ever.

Unruly women surround us in our everyday lives, yet such figures become most powerful in celebrity form, where they become even more layered and fraught with contradiction. The next ten chapters thus examine female celebrities, from Serena Williams to Lena Dunham, who have been conceived of as unruly in some capacity. And while each chapter is named for the celebrity’s dominant mode of unruliness—too slutty, too gross, too queer— each of these women is unruly in multiple, compounding ways: Serena Williams is too strong, but she’s also too masculine, too rude, too fashionable, too black; Lena Dunham is too naked, but she’s also too loud, too aggressive, too powerful, too revealing, too much.

I’ve filled the book with women who occupy all different corners of the mainstream, from the literary world to Hollywood, from HBO to the tennis court. It includes several women of color, but the prevalence of straight white women serves to highlight an 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. When a black woman talks too loud or too honestly, she becomes “troubling” or “angry” or “out of control”; a queer woman who talks about sex suddenly becomes proof that all gay people are intrinsically promiscuous. It’s one thing to be a young, cherub-faced, straight woman doing and saying things that make people uncomfortable. It’s quite another—and far riskier—to do those same things in a body that is not white, not straight, not slender, not young, or not American.

Each chapter starts with the thesis of a particular woman’s unruliness—Melissa McCarthy’s status as “too fat,” for example—and unravels the way this behavior has been historically framed as an affliction at odds with proper femininity. The more you analyze what makes these behaviors transgressive, the easier it is to see what they’re threatening: what it means to be a woman, of course, but also entrenched understandings of women’s passive role in society. While the book centers around highly visible women, it also reveals the expectations surrounding every woman’s behavior—and why talking too loudly, acting too promiscuously, or exposing too much skin is so incredibly threatening to the status quo.

That threat is part of why talking about any of the women in this book opens the floodgates to controversy. Whether the discussion takes place on Facebook or at happy hour, mentioning these women is the quickest way to escalate the conversation, alienate friends, offend elders, and turn off dates. Their bodies, words, and actions have become a locus for the type of inflammatory rhetoric usually reserved only for political figures. It’s as if each of these women is constantly igniting the line of acceptable behavior: you don’t know where it is until she steps over it, at which point it bursts into flames.

Celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work: the way we pinpoint and police representations of everything from blackness to queerness, from femininity to pregnancy. Which is why the success of these unruly women is inextricable from the confluence of attitudes toward women in the 2010s: the public reembrace of feminism set against a backdrop of increased legislation of women’s bodies, the persistence of the income gap, the...