Top Quotes: “Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman” — Anne Helen Petersen

“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.”

“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 policing of how women’s bodies should look and act in public, and the election of Trump. 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.”

“In a 1994 profile, the myth of the family — woven, primarily, by the Williams’ father, Richard — was already coming into focus. Richard had decided that his girls — the fourth and fifth daughters in a family of five girls — would become tennis players. No matter that they lived in one of the “roughest areas of Los Angeles,” as dozens of publications would put it, in slightly different variations — Richard and Oracene, the girls’ mother, found tennis courts, dubbed them the “East Compton Hills Country Club,” and began training every day.

Richard and Oracene homeschooled the girls, learning drills and techniques from books and VHS videos. Even after drive-by shootings threatened their safety on the courts, they maintained their strict daily schedule. “To prevent against such dangers in the future,” one profile explained, “Richard Williams struck a deal with the three dominant gangs in the area — a member from each stood guard during hitting sessions.”

The veracity of that anecdote matters less than what Williams was doing by repeating it to the press. His daughters were different, it suggests, and not just because of the color of their skin. Unlike other players who arrived at the sport because their class and place in society afforded them the possibility, the Williamses fought their way in. Any victory from that point forward would not be out of luck, or proximity to privilege, or pedigree. It would be through sheer strength, work, and will.”

“Her comedic personas revel in the unruliness of the fat body; her most popular characters are some intersection of low class, sexually dominant, profane, and generally negligent of their place in the societal hierarchy. “If there is a McCarthy type,” a 2016 Guardian profile declared, “it is the woman who does things you pretty much never see a woman do on screen.” But that unruliness is neutralized by her reassuringly “normal” persona, and the insistence that her most unruly performances are just that: a fugue state, an escape, a vent that can be opened and closed.

The thesis that unites press coverage of McCarthy is simple: she may be fat, but it’s a nice, tasteful, contained sort of fat. The sort of fatness that doesn’t complain about size-based discrimination, or speak out about the class and racial components of fatness, or wear clothes that aren’t figure-flattering. And while McCarthy has, in many ways, leaned in to that coverage, she also challenges it, working to relocate the conversation away from her body, drawing attention to the ways in which the business practices of plus-size fashion stigmatize and ghettoize more than half the population. Her unruliness might be tempered, but that doesn’t mean it’s not quietly, consistently radical.”

“It’s safe to watch a fat, unruly woman as long as she’s contained on-screen. Which helps explain why the careers of Mae West and Roseanne Barr were gradually destroyed by “real life” unruly behaviors.”

“That’s been McCarthy’s consistent stance when publicizing her body: “I’ll be up, I’ll be down, probably for the rest of my life,” she told Refinery29. “The thing is, if that is the most interesting thing about me, I need to go have a lavender farm in Minnesota and give this up. There has to be something more.” Assenting 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.”

“”When I grew up I saw females doing certain things, and I thought I had to do that exactly,” Minaj told Vibe magazine in 2010, just as she was rising to national prominence. “The female rappers of my day spoke about sex a lot.. And I thought that to have the success they got, I would have to represent the same thing. When in fact I didn’t have to represent the same thing.”

Instead, she adopted a cornucopia of identities, some more fully fleshed than others, to accompany the various aural personalities that distinguished her rapping style. Most prominently, there’s Roman Zolanski, a gay British boy with a cockney accent and a deep reservoir of rage, and Harajuku Barbie, with a girly voice and hyper-feminine aesthetic, but there are nearly a dozen more: Nicki the Ninja, Point Dexter, Female Weezy, Nicki the Boss, Nicki Lewinsky.

These personas, Minaj explains, allow her to occupy attitudes often viewed as “unacceptable” for women: they’re angry, lewd, coy, uncouth, violent, and frequently at odds, as in the video for “Monster,” when two of the personas verbally spar as one binds and whips the other. They also serve as a commentary on the fractured, performative nature of femininity: as Minaj explains, “Every woman is multifaceted. Every woman has a switch, whether she’s going to be maternal, whether she’s going to be a man-eater, whether she has to kick ass, whether she has to be one of the boys.”

“That’s the thing about Minaj: she understands, like few celebrities before her, how to get people to tell her story, pay her attention, appreciate her artistry, propagate her message, acknowledge her mastery — and all of it on her terms. As countless interviews and interactions have demonstrated, she’s not the passive participant in someone else’s story of who she is. She bursts through the glossy veneer of the celebrity industrial complex, wrests control of the narrative, calls bullshit on the rhetoric and mechanisms that would frame her as unruly, acting out, overly aggressive. Because Minaj is not, in fact, too slutty — or too rude, or too weird, or too manipulative. She simply has something that’s long been inaccessible for female celebrities, and black ones in particular: total control.”

“Madonna’s logic is not wholly wrong: she has broken boundaries so dramatically, so incandescently, that they’ve never been reconstructed. But what she’s suggesting with age isn’t that all women in their fifties and sixties should be relevant. Rather, she believes that women who look like her can be relevant. It’s a highly individualistic approach to a societal affliction, but it shouldn’t be surprising: in addition to pop and postmodernism, Madonna also embodies the ideologies of postfeminism, with its attendant privileging of the desires, power, and pleasure of the individual woman over actual equality and rights for women in general.

It makes sense, then, that Madonna never complained about ageism until she experienced it. Even if, all the way back in 1992, she famously questioned, “Are people just supposed to die when they’re 40?” she never championed older women artists, or defended them when they went through their own attacks for being “too sexual.” And while she conceives of her work today as kicking down the door for female musicians to come, she hasn’t sought to collaborate with those, like Jennifer Lopez, or Gwen Stefani, on the cusp of “old age,” instead opting to associate with Ariana Grande or Katy Perry, who might call her “Grandma” onstage but for whose youth she seems desperate.”

“Not only has Madonna’s career traded on the currency of her body, and the vibrant, variable beauty that attended it, but through this, she increased the value of its economy at large, as well as other female celebrities’ near-compulsory participation in it. It’s not that there weren’t constantly surveilled sex symbols before Madonna; it’s that today, there are so few ways to become a celebrity without being one.”

“If you were born after 1991, you’ve never known a time when pregnancy wasn’t performed in public: 1991 was the watershed year in which Demi Moore appeared naked, seven months pregnant with her second daughter, Scout, on the cover of Vanity Fair. The cover became instantly iconic, mocked and replicated.”

“It’s difficult to emphasize just how radical this attitude would seem to women experiencing pregnancy even thirty years ago. To be pregnant in public was in poor taste — unsophisticated, trashy, unbecoming, obscene. That sense of the pregnant body as abject goes back millennia, as the pregnant body is a woman’s body at its most fecund, but also in its most grotesque figuration: the body swells, expands, and oozes, the boundary between inside and outside permeable.”

“Historically, the easiest way to contain that abjection was to keep the pregnancy out of sight. Women of a certain class often receded entirely from public view until after the baby was born and the visible signs of pregnancy had diminished. When the birth occurred, it happened in the domestic space and was managed by midwives. Like all things hidden for fear of abjection (women’s sexuality, menstrual periods, feces), it became societally unacceptable to even speak openly of pregnancy: according to historian Carol Brooks Gardner, in nineteenth-century America “talk of pregnancy was forbidden even between mother and daughter, if either hoped to claim breeding and gentility.” Colloquialisms were developed to refer tactfully to the obscenity of a woman’s condition: she was “with child” or “in a family way, never “pregnant.”

Up until the 1950s, the word “pregnancy” was not even allowed on-screen. In 1953, the Motion Picture Association of America refused to approve the script for The Moon Is Blue because it included the word “pregnant”; the MPAA’s list of “13 Don’ts and 31 Be Carefuls,” which determined what could and could not make its way on-screen from the 1920s to the 1960s, included a ban on any depiction of childbirth, even “in silhouette.” In silent film-era Hollywood, most stars avoided motherhood in one way or another so as to sustain their marketability; those who did become pregnant removed themselves from public view, even as the studios offered access to all other parts of the stars’ homes and family life. As late as the 1950s, stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds were seldom photographed while pregnant — just during the blissful, bonding aftermath.”

“It makes sense that women’s inclination toward disordered eating spikes so sharply during and after pregnancy: that’s how strongly weight gain of any kind, even related to pregnancy, is stigmatized.”

“”Shrillness” is just a word to describe what happens when a woman; with her higher-toned voice, attempts to speak loudly.”

“Clinton has been considered unruly in some capacity for more than forty years. Her 1969 commencement speech at Wellesley was so incendiary that, according to dozens of retellings, it prompted a seven-minute standing ovation. The speech, which was later featured in Life magazine, was about the future — her hopes for it, her curiosity about it — but it was also a critique of the university life that had sheltered her and her fellow students. After graduation, she went to Alaska and worked in a cannery until she was fired for complaining about working conditions. She chose to attend Yale Law School when a Harvard law professor told her that they already “had enough women.” She became a part of Walter Mondale’s Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, researching the working conditions and lived experiences of migrant workers. She headed up George McGovern’s campaign in the state of Texas. She refused Bill Clinton’s repeated proposals of marriage. All before the age of twenty-five.”

“More women in politics — and vying for the presidency is precisely what’s necessary for the paradigm to actually shift. In a study conducted over the course of several decades in India, certain villages were assigned, at random, to be run by women. All the candidates for office were women; women were the only choice. At first, citizens still voiced a preference for male leadership — yet as with Clinton’s time in office, their rating of women’s competency, once they were in power, increased. Still, it was only after these villages were forced to have not just one female leader, but two, that their citizens demonstrated an increased willingness to vote for women in “open” elections.”

“As Bordo explains, “the control of female appetite for food is merely the most concrete expression of the general rule governing the construction of femininity: that female hunger — for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification — be contained, and the public space that women be allowed to take up be circumscribed, limited.” Put differently, hunger has become the antithesis of “good” femininity: to eat, to desire, to be unsatisfied is to be a “bad woman.” The most vivid manifestation of that badness, that unruliness, is fat on one’s body, implying a lack of control, a lack of respect toward social mores.”