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

Clinton’s treatment suggested a much larger cultural ill, one that had less to do with the specifics of her personality and more to do with the enduring structures of patriarchy—structures that had bearing on more than just the woman standing on the stage asking you to vote for her. It was one thing to dislike Clinton. It was quite another to ignor

But after attending the reunion, and feeling none of the elitism or snobbery she’d expected, Weiner admitted that she might be mapping her own insecurity onto others: “The overall pleasant evening has led me to the painful realization that I’ve spent 15 years insisting that books like mine deserve a place on the shelf, and maybe I don’t entirely be

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.

“In other words, only a man’s voice sounds like it tells important truths.”

some point, every single one of these women has “failed”—or, perhaps more generously, presented inconsistencies—in her resistance. Those moments shouldn’t be read as failures, however, so much as testaments to the sheer tenacity of the ideologies of femininity that shame, alienate, and expel those who refuse them.

Put simply: you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t. Try too hard, and you’re disgusting; don’t try at all, and you’re invisible.

The political power of drag resides in its ability to draw attention to just how performative gender can be. By amplifying characteristics of femininity or masculinity, it highlights their absurdity, their arbitrariness, and just how easily they can be applied and abandoned.

The tendency to label Minaj “too slutty” or sexually explicit is a symptom of a much larger anxiety: how to process a woman, and a black woman in particular, who has taken control of her body, her formidable talents, and the way they are marketed, monetized, and received.

As Weiner puts it, “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 recognit

In the end, matriarchy isn’t the fear. Rather, it’s the idea that women will define their own value, and their own futures, on their own terms instead of by terms men have laid out—put differently, that each gender, and each individual, will have the power to determine their own destiny.