The crafting of the face is a billion-dollar industry because there’s actually only one truly acceptable face to create: that of “the girl.” The girl… - 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 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 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.

Women can consider themselves free, feminist, and liberated in so many ways — yet still be controlled by the notion of an ideal body of which their own continually falls short.

To turn black women into objectified others was to underline their difference; they may be beautiful, but they are of another kind, separate from the dominant understanding of attractiveness.