Cote - Too much: how Victorian constraints still bind women today

A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, weve flinched in self-scornugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excessbelting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhapsbut in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who meets the world with intensity is a woman who endures lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without.

In Victorian England, the medical establishment would have labeled us hysterical, pathologically immoderate in emotional and physiological expression. Heres how a German-born doctor practicing in London, one Julius Althaus, defined the condition in 1866: All the symptoms of hysteria have their prototype in those vital actions by which grief, terror, disappointment, and other painful emotions and affections, are manifested under ordinary circumstances, and which become signs of hysteria as soon as they attain a certain degree of intensity. Of course, a certain degree of intensity invites a vast range of interpretation, and when it came to emotional eruptions, the Victorians were none too generous. Hysteria was a convenient means of pathologizingand thus regulatingfeminine feeling and its expression. Today, as many among us grieve our political optimism and hammer out our anger on social media, we find our husbands, our boyfriends, our parents, our politicians diagnosing us with similar maladies: were wallowing in it, why are we so freaked out, we must be bleeding out of our wherever. Take a Xanax, girl, and calm down.

We are the women who can hardly contain our screams, and, oftentimes, we dont. Our muchness oozes from our pores like acidic sweat: ranker, more caustic, less concealable than ever. But however brutally the stigma may sizzle in this political moment, this sense that we are somehow Too Much is hardly new to usnor will it dissipate whenever Donald Trumps vise finally unclenches from our skulls. I conceived the idea for this booka critical cry of bullshit against this concept, Too Muchsome years ago, during a comparatively happier presidency. This term, Too Much, pernicious in its ambiguity, attacks with the force of history. Its the overdetermined exponent of ideologies, centuries old, structured by misogyny, racism, and homophobia. American society fetishizes white heteronormative propriety: it wants its girls pliable and demuregirls who safeguard both tears and sex for the privacy of the bedroom, who keep their voices measured during meetings, and who brush their hair and blot their lipstick. It worships the woman who, if she should experience distress, will wear her sadness like Lana Del Rey or