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

By Anne Helen Petersen

**One of NPR’s Best Books of 2017** 

“Petersen's gloriously bumptious, brash ode to nonconforming women suits the needs of this dark moment. Her careful examination of how we eviscerate the women who confound or threaten is crucial reading if we are ever to be better.”—Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of All the Single Ladies

From celebrity gossip expert and BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen comes an accessible, analytical look at how female celebrities are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an “acceptable” woman. 
 
You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of “unruliness” to explore the ascension of powerhouses like Serena Williams, Hillary Clinton, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud is a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.

“Must-read list.”—Entertainment Weekly
Named one of Cosmopolitan’s “Books You Won't Be Able to Put Down This Summer” 
Selected as one of Amazon's “Best Books of the Month”
A Refinery29 Editors' Pick

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780399576867

Anne Helen Petersen

Anne Helen Petersen is an American writer and journalist based in Missoula, Montana. She worked as a Senior Culture Writer for Buzzfeed until 2020 when she began writing a newsletter for subscribers at Substack. A former academic, Petersen received her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of three previous books, including Can’t Even: how millennials became the burnout generation (2020).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

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, typing: 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 nearly three 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.

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♦   ♦   ♦

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 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.

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♦   ♦   ♦

This is far from the first time the unruly woman has taken on such outsized importance in the American imagination. Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Mae West, Elizabeth Taylor, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Fonda—all were unruly in some capacity, and that unruliness is part of the reason their names live on. The most potent manifestation in recent history, however, dates to the early nineties, when Roseanne Barr became the unruly woman par excellence: her show, Roseanne, dominated the television landscape, overtaking The Cosby Show as the top-rated program on television in 1989. For the next six years, it remained in the top five Nielsen programs—an unprecedented feat for a show that not only focused on a working-class family, but also introduced and interrogated queer and feminist issues.

Roseanne boldly challenged the image of middle-class respectability proffered by sitcoms like The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, Family Ties, and Family Matters. The family’s house was messy and claustrophobic; money was always tight, and Roseanne and her husband, Dan, played by John Goodman, were always exhausted from work. Their kids could be rude or obscene, and the parents often responded in kind.

In her groundbreaking work The Unruly Woman, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn points to the ways in which Barr used her stardom to highlight the vast gap between the progressive aspirations of Second Wave Feminism and the lived reality of providing for a working-class family in the wake of Reaganism.¹ That Roseanne chose a working-class mother as the avatar of her rebellion is significant: the fiscal constraints of her situation meant that her options for rebellion manifested in the volume of her voice, the expanse of her body, the clutter of her living room, and the overarching refusal to make a working-class home be simply a less expensive version of a bourgeois one.

Outside of Roseanne, Barr cultivated an equally unruly celebrity image: there was her public courting of and marriage to fellow comedian Tom Arnold, and her 1990 rendition of the national anthem at a baseball game, so off-key and flippant it prompted President George H. W. Bush to decry it as disgraceful. She was, as my mother put it, not in good taste—which is part of why, as a ten-year-old girl, I wasn’t allowed to watch Roseanne even as I witnessed equally ribald humor on shows like Home Improvement.

Karlyn points to a profound ambivalence around Roseanne—even though she was the star of one of the most popular shows on television, even if the readers of People magazine voted her their Top Female Star, she was still a subject of slight disgust.² Esquire manifested this split attitude when it featured her in its pages by writing two pieces: one in favor, the other against. On the cover of Vanity Fair, she was declared Roseanne on Top—but the accompanying image showed her pinning Arnold to the ground, her breasts overflowing, her mouth in a devious cackle. Her power was abundant, but it had to be distorted—made frightening—for public consumption. Roseanne was figured as just barely in control of herself, her body, her behavior, which made it all the easier to frame her as dangerously out of control (and a threat to America) when she dared to sing the national anthem off-key. It would take more than a decade for a woman with a similarly unruly energy to reach something close to her level of stardom again.

What happened to Roseanne should be instructive. It’s tempting to think of unruly women as radicals transgressing and usurping societal norms—and while they do make rebellion and disobedience imaginable or palatable, their actions can also serve to fortify dominant norms. Take the example of Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, who became the outspoken spokesperson for a feminist, liberal, progressive wing of country in the mid-2000s. By transgressing the boundaries of their genre, the Dixie Chicks endeared themselves to certain fans, but they also alienated themselves from the very root of their stardom. Today, articles about slightly transgressive country stars like Kacey Musgraves hold up the Dixie Chicks as a cautionary tale. The Dixie Chicks may have crossed the line, but they didn’t break it down; instead, the line has been built up stronger than before.

It’s a common narrative for the unruly woman. It happened to Mae West, the ribald comedian of the 1930s whose full figure sparked a trend against reducing, only to have her witty, and self-authored, brand of humor censored to the point of banality and obscurity over the course of the decade. It struck Jane Fonda amidst her activism in Vietnam; it beset Roseanne in the 1990s; it afflicted Rosie O’Donnell after the demise of her talk show in the 2000s, and it has already begun to happen to many of the women featured in this book: unruliness can spark a firestorm, but it can also scorch the very ground on which they tread.

Roseanne, Jane Fonda, and Mae West were all divisive figures, but it wasn’t as simple as camps for and against: they could spark feelings of fascination and repulsion at the same time, a sentiment that should sound familiar to fans of many of the women in this book. There are all sorts of things that attract our curiosity but which societal norms tell us we should reject—things that trespass the unspoken yet often rigid borders of good taste. Scholars have a term for objects, peoples, and ideas that inspire these feelings of attraction and rejection: abject. By strict definition, abject refers to things that are horrendously bad, unpleasant, or degrading—things that, as the word’s Latin roots, abijicere (to reject) and jacere (to throw), suggest, must be repudiated and cast aside.

Instead of hiding their abjection, unruly women amplify it: Madonna asserts her body as sexual past the age when it can be; Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer talk openly about shit and periods; Kim Kardashian refuses to hide her pregnant body. Others do so by troubling the distinction between borders: Serena Williams’s body is muscular like a man’s and curvy like a woman’s, while Nicki Minaj and Hillary Clinton trespass into male-dominated cultural spheres. If a defining characteristic of the abject is the command to throw it out, these women refuse it—which, of course, renders them all the more compelling.

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♦   ♦   ♦

Every few decades, an unruly female celebrity inflames the popular consciousness. What distinguishes our current cultural moment, then, is how thoroughly unruly women have come to dominate the zeitgeist: Girls and Broad City have inspired more conversation over the last three years than any other thirty-minute shows. Melissa McCarthy is one of the most reliable box office draws in Hollywood today. Lena Dunham’s book, Not That Kind of Girl, reached number two on The New York Times bestseller list; her newsletter, Lenny, boasts more than half a million subscribers. Nicki Minaj’s third album, The Pinkprint, debuted at number two on the Billboard charts; the video for Anaconda has been viewed 650 million times. Serena Williams has won twenty-three grand slams. The 20/20 special focused on Caitlyn Jenner’s transition garnered a staggering 20.7 million viewers.³ Jennifer Weiner’s books have sold more than thirteen million copies worldwide. Kim Kardashian took in more than $51 million in 2016.⁴ And Clinton, remember, won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million.

Yet for all these women’s visibility and profitability, they compete against a far more palatable—and, in many cases, more successful—form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom. Exemplified by Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Alba, Blake Lively, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Ivanka Trump, these women rarely trend on Twitter, but they’ve built tremendously successful brands by embracing the new domesticity, defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first-century gentility. They have slim, disciplined bodies and adorable pregnancies; they never wear the wrong thing or speak negatively or make themselves abrasive in any way. Importantly, these celebrities are also all white—or, in the case of Jessica Alba, careful to elide any connotations of ethnicity—and straight.

By transforming themselves into brands, filling their online stores with goods and clothing and accessories, they imply that every woman can have the same sort of contentment: all they need to do is buy a dress, purchase some chemical-free baby wipes, and follow a complicated recipe for a vegan smoothie, and they can have the same bronzed glow of contentment as these celebs. You can see their influence across Pinterest and the mommy-blogosphere, where many women reproduce the rhetoric of self-care and affirmation even as they police the bodies, parenting choices, consumption habits, and lifestyle decisions of both themselves and others.

The women I’ve chosen for case studies in this book function as implicit and explicit alternatives to the new domesticity. Yet at the same time, they’ve also all made themselves amenable to popular consumption. Some, like Kardashian, generally abide by social standards, but her unruly performance of pregnancy, and the backlash against it, highlights just how readily the tide of public acceptance can turn. Others, like Kardashian’s stepparent, Caitlyn Jenner, belong to a category that’s only very recently become societally sanctioned and even legally protected—yet every step that Jenner makes is carefully calculated so as to assuage anxieties about her transformation. Melissa McCarthy calls out the assumptions people make about fat people but never gets truly mad; Hillary Clinton is incredibly mindful to modulate her voice so as to never appear angry in public.

There are hundreds of women in the public sphere who don’t exercise such careful modulation—women who are relegated to niche corners of pop culture because they’ve been figured as too big, queer, loud, smart, sexual, or otherwise abject for mainstream audiences. Women like Lea DeLaria, the first openly gay comic to appear on late-night television all the way back in 1993, who has struggled to find higher-profile roles than her supporting bit on Orange Is the New Black. Or Mo’Nique, who was outspoken about her refusal to participate in the Oscar campaign for her performance in Precious—and found herself a Hollywood outcast. Or even Kim Novak, once considered one of the most beautiful stars in Hollywood, whose plastic surgery–facilitated attempts to maintain her youthful face have rendered her an object of severe ridicule.

Women like DeLaria, Mo’Nique, and Novak might be briefly defended in think pieces, but they’re nevertheless excluded from salable stardom: they’re simply too much for the broad, middling, easily offended audience so necessary for a mainstream stardom. The rejection of these women makes it clear: there’s still a firm line of acceptable female behavior. And while it might, in this moment, be cool and profitable to toe it, to find oneself on the other side is tantamount to career suicide.

In the end, all of the unruly women in this book have made concessions in order to have their work approved and disseminated by the mainstream. By focusing on unruliness that’s made its way into the mainstream, this book considers the costs and benefits of smoothing one’s sharp edges just enough to make it onto the cover of Vanity Fair or into the pages of GQ, multiplexes across America, or the White House—and the implication that unruliness is still largely the provenance of women who are white and straight.

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♦   ♦   ♦

Someone might look at a picture of me, or read my résumé, and wonder what interest I would have in unruliness: I’m white, I’m blonde, I’m not fat. I grew up middle-class in a midsize town. I got straight As. I was a cheerleader for seven years. The only time I got in trouble in high school was for skipping A.P. English to go to the premiere of Star Wars. I’m straight and cisgender. I attended a good college and went on to pursue a PhD. I’ve received one speeding ticket. But so much of that amenability—that need to please, that lack of acting out—stemmed from a posture of fear.

My mother was a weirdo, non-makeup-wearing mathematician, so the fear certainly didn’t come from her. But I was always cripplingly terrified of what people thought of me: my classmates, the boys I liked and even the ones I didn’t, random people on the street, the teachers whose approval I craved. That fear was so overwhelming that I allowed it to temper and otherwise silence the parts of myself that gave me joy. I stopped raising my hand as much in class. I disciplined my body through various forms of over-exercise and disordered eating, not because I liked running, but because I was mortified by the thought of getting fat. I didn’t believe God would forsake me if I lost my virginity, but I kept it out of anxiety that I’d be labeled a slut. I didn’t drink because who knew what embarrassing thing I might say or do while drunk. I was happy, ostensibly, but every move was motivated by fear. Part of this fear was derived from living in a rural town where gossip and small-mindedness made other ways of being unthinkable, but part of it was entirely my own devising.

I spent the bulk of my adolescent life internalizing the fact that girls who crossed that invisible line would become pariahs: excised from their communities and families, unable to find work or companionship. I was wrong, of course, but it took finding my own group of weird, confident, too much friends for me to lean into my own difference, my own modes of unruliness. It’s taken many years for those behaviors to blossom, and many internal checks remain stubbornly difficult to slough. Just because you spend years analyzing unruliness doesn’t mean you’re not subject to the trenchant cultural imperative to shun, shame, and reject it.

Which is precisely why I wanted to write this book: these unruly women are so magnetic, but that magnetism is countered, at every point, by ideologies that train both men and women to distance themselves from those behaviors in our own lives. Put differently, it’s one thing to admire such abrasiveness and disrespect for the status quo in someone else; it’s quite another to take that risk in one’s own life.

That’s why the threat of a backlash feels so real. These female celebrities may be popular, but does their stardom contribute to an actual sea change of acceptable behaviors and bodies and ways of being for women today? None of these chapters offers a clear answer, in part because that answer is less dependent on the women themselves and more on the way we, as cultural consumers, decide to talk and think about them. Not as women acting out and, as such, in need of censoring, but as endlessly deserving of our consideration: both critical and compassionate.

My hope is that this book unites the enthralling, infuriating, and exhilarating conversations that swirl around these women, but also incites new and more expansive ones. Because these women and their unruliness matter—and the best way to show their gravity and power and influence is to refuse to shut up about why they do.

CHAPTER 1

TOO STRONG:

SERENA WILLIAMS

Imagine all the female tennis players in the world: their tan legs, their perky ponytails,

Reviews for Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

[thewestwing-864351 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this. I thought the examples of celebrities there were used were well thought out, though they were primarily white women.

[juva_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A character study of several infamous women in pop culture today. All of them fall into the category of what the author calls "unruly women". These are women who do not meet society's standards of femininity in some way which leads them to be both widely lauded and vilified. For each one she analyzes their career and what it is about them that society refuses to accept. This then naturally breaks down into a discussion about what can be learned about society and its view of womanhood. The subjects range widely between political figures and reality TV stars, but all exemplify some character flaw that our society has label as unacceptable.

[jenniferelizabeth2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a wanna-be librarian and lifelong reader, the chapter on Jennifer Weiner alone is worth grabbing this book.

[rocketjk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud is a series of essays about women who have gained success, fame and/or notoriety in American culture and the ways in which they've had to go against mainstream cultural expectations about the ways women should behave (hence: unruly) in order to attain their goals.

The premise--that American popular society places restrictive boundaries on its expectations for how women should behave and the ways in which they are and aren't "allowed" to achieve success--is hardly a new one. Nevertheless, while I found some of Petersen's examples and explanations problematic, these are issues that, in my opinion, need to be addressed and brought to our society's (especially male society members such as myself) attention endlessly and in many different ways.

I thought that the best two essays were the first two: "Too Strong - Serena Williams" and "Too Fat - Melissa McCarthy." The "Too Strong" chapter explores the ways in which Serena Williams' physical strength and muscular body--and her unabashed pride in both--confounded the culture's expectations and caused pushback against her successes. Also particularly good was, "Too Pregnant - Kim Kardashian" which examines the ways in which women are and aren't allowed to be pregnant and famous in public.

I did not find all of the chapters to be as strong or as coherent, however. For example, in "Too Old - Madonna," Peterson seems as critical of Madonna for trying to maintain a youthful-looking body and overall appearance as she is of the culture for forcing her into such choices in order to retain relevance in the pop music world. In "Too Queer - Caitlyn Jenner," Peterson criticizes Jenner's attempts to be transnormative, to attain as closely as possible the appearance of a "normal" woman and follows Jenner's progressions and growth via the episodes of her reality television show. So, not until the very end, is Jenner unruly enough to gain Petersen's approval.

These are all, of course, essays about famous women, which may or may not reflect the experiences of "everyday" women (for lack of a better term off the top of my head). This is in one way predominantly a book about celebrity. While the overarching issues discussed in this collections are crucial, I think, across the board, the Kardashian essay about the perils of being pregnant in the media may not necessarily resonate with all women. Peterson, who, according to the back cover of the book, has a Facebook page titled "CelebrityGossipAcademic Style" spends a lot of time describing the reaction to many of her subjects from media outlets like People Magazine. Certainly, the ways in which we measure ourselves against the images and attitudes expressed in mainstream popular media is an important factor in our overall culture. It was problematic at times for me, though, because I have little interest in such publications. I'm so out of the loop culturally, in fact, that I hadn't even heard of some of her subjects. That didn't prevent be from being interested in Petersen's explorations of her topics, however.

So, overall, I'm glad I read these essays. Much of the info will be old news to people who have followed these issues closely. Certainly, the general ideas were old news to me, but I still found the individual examinations of these issues to be useful overall.

So that's my male perspective on this book.

[carleneinspired · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

ARC provided in exchange for an honest review.

Women have grown up with an expectation that they must be a certain way, but as they age they challenge those societal norms, embracing who they are loudly and proudly. Anne Helen Petersen challenges the preconceived notion of how women must be with ten analytical essays that breakdown how women are perceived, specifically in the media. The celebrities featured in each essay come from different background, their careers vary, and their type of unruly behavior is not the same, but the message from AHP is clear; society's perception of women is an issue that needs to be challenged.

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman is written by Anne Helen Petersen, an author with Buzzfeed. The Buzzfeed part will either scare off readers or bring more to the table. AHP examines ten female celebrities and the media's perception of them; Serena Williams is too strong, Nicki Minaj is too slutty, and Jennifer Weiner is too loud. The short essays, though about different celebrities, read very similarly to one another and I found that they were better when read over a lengthy period of time. The unruly behaviors became repetitive, but I still found myself challenging my own preconceived notion of myself, of other women, and of celebrities. You'd think it might be hard to connect yourself to Nicki Minaj, a female rapper who makes money in higher quantities than I could ever imagine having, but AHP writes in a way that has you nodding your head and putting yourself in their shoes. In fact, that was my favorite essay of all and I am not a fan of her music at all. The essay broke down her struggles to get respect, to embrace who she was, and how she continues to challenge the world to embrace her as well. I don't have to be a fan of her music to respect her drive, her continued reign in the music industry, and her smoking hot body that if I had I'd probably show off too.

I didn't agree with the entire book, because AHP calls out some celebrities by name who have embraced the societal norm. There's no study to why they may have chosen that route, but rather harsh judgement and critique, which I felt really took away from the message of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud. The book challenges the reader to look at specific celebrities' hurdles and how they overcome them publicly, yet puts down those that embrace their feminism in a different way. It comes across as telling the reader we should applaud and celebrate those that are truly unruly (we should), but condemn those that are happy as housewives with lifestyle brands (we definitely should not). If I rate this on a personal level, I think it's a novel that can challenge readers to accept unruly behavior, that shows the positives, but I also think it does nothing to challenge the judgement we inflict on one another every day. In fact, it reads as though AHP encourages readers to judge those blonde, thin celebrities that are classic in their aging, as though that is a negative when it is in fact not. I think it was appropriate of AHP to compare women to one another, in several essays the comparison is complimentary, but in others I think it was a step backwards. I would've been happier had the message been more about accepting every type of size, age, look, attitude, etc. If we are to truly reach a point where we are equal women too need to embrace both the "standard definition" of femininity and the unruly femininity featured in this book.

Overall, I really enjoyed Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud and Anne Helen Petersen does an excellent job of taking a massive topic, Women's Studies, and making it easy to read and very accessible. The book is branded in a way that will bring in more readers and I think that's an incredibly positive step forward. In a world where many people rely on the gossip of celebrities' lives in order to make any decisions, AHP breaks down the media critique and how it impacts their personal lives and how it changes our humanity. I think the subject matter is excellent for reaching a broad customer base and will encourage discussions with its thought-provoking exam of feminism and pop culture. I may not have agreed with the entire book, but I agree with its goal and I think more women need to be challenging the norm and turning their judgement into acceptance.

[teachlz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My Review of "The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Women" by Anne Helen Peterson  PLUME, An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2017

I appreciate the timeless hours of research that Anne Helen Peterson, Author  of "The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman" has spent in providing, what I feel seem like "essays"  of famous women in today's Pop Culture.   Is it any wonder in today's "Me Too"  Generation, that there is a feeling of discontent?  There always has been a difference in the way men and women have been treated in terms of Politics, Salaries, and Role- models. This book will make you feel something. I know that I had very strong feelings, and memories of many unfair things have  happened through the years. Recently, I did research  on a car I wanted to purchase. Only when I brought my husband to "sit" while I discussed what I wanted, was I taken seriously.

What is "Unruly" behavior? According to the dictionary, "unruly" disorderly and disruptive and not amenable to discipline or control." The women discussed in these chapters have "exhibited "  "UNRULY" behavior in one way or another, and the outcomes are different.

The author spans across women in today's Pop-culture, and focuses on the things that make them seem unruly. These are the chapters and women discussed:   "1"Too Strong"-Serena Williams.  2. "Too Fat- Melissa McCarthy"  3. "Too Gross"-Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer" 4. 'Too Slutty"-Nicki Minaj"  5. "Too Old"-Madonna  6.Too Pregnant"- "Kim Kardashian" 7. "Too Shrill"-Hilary Clinton"  8."Too Queer"-  Caitlyn Jenner " 9. "Too Loud" -Jennifer Weiner" and "Too Naked"- Lena Durham"

This is a "taste" of the smorgasbord of "unruly" women, but you really have to read the chapters to understand more. For example, Author Jennifer Weiner, not only wanted to be recognized for her own accomplishments, she wanted the New York Times to represent Women Authors Seriously. Kudos to Jennifer Weiner for opening the door to The New York Times to hire a woman in that department, and give women authors a fair chance.

This is a dry book that at times, feels like I was doing homework. There were some intriguing points of interest mentioned and researched data for each chapter. There is not one touch of humor at all.

I stay away from describing my feelings about politics. I have seen friends give ultimatums and become bullies if things weren't seen their way.  I could see that this book could set off some arguments about society and the establishment. The chapters on "Fatness" and "Aging" as well as Pregnancy, and the other chapters are all open to possibly unfriendly debate.  This is not an easy read, and certainly doesn't fall in the category of "entertainment" . I would recommend this for readers that show an interest in  reading about contemporary issues with an open mind.

[kaylaraeintheway · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Petersen presents common "complaints" about women today through examples of famous women who people point the finger at for embodying those traits. Instead, Petersen turns the negative connotations on their heads and praises the women who dare to be other than what some would deem acceptable. Nothing in here is terribly revolutionary, but it was still enjoyable to read these feminist essays.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very good piece of feminist cultural criticism. This is a genre I read little of because I find most often it is ridiculously obvious and/or merely unsupported opinion rants. (See, eg Bad Feminist.) These essays are neither. They do something I really like in my criticism; these essays call me on my shit. And because they are well supported, I can't rationalize my way out of that. I was made to see that things I was doing were in fact anti-woman, and I need to do better. That is not to say I agree with every conclusion here. This is commentary not algebra, there are no absolutely right answers. Regardless though of whether you agree with Peterson, you can't just dismiss this. I will mention too that Peterson lets you know why these things really matter, and I think that is very helpful for many who do not generally see how individual events impact what comes next.

I am predisposed to like the author because she convinced UT to give her a PhD in celebrity gossip. But I am also predisposed to not like her for her mean-spirited and often unnecessary "think pieces" in Buzzfeed. So with that conflict as a foundation I read this and gave it 4.5 stars. It was not perfect. But it is necessary reading.

[relativelybooktastic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

-I received this book in exchange for my honest feedback-

This book is well written and gives an insight into why certain celebrities are perceived in a certain way. This collection of short stories is a must read for all. It just reminds me why we should not wear labels but always be inspired to be the best, be unique and be kind to everyone. I recommend this book to all.

[askelmore · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Best for: Those interested in a detailed analysis of the different ways women are seen as not conforming (unless you’re interested in those who are too old - that chapter was not great).

In a nutshell: Buzzfeed writer Petersen looks at ten different women and how each can be an example of being too ‘something’ that women aren’t meant to be, and how they use that to subvert the system.

Line that sticks with me: “To call Clinton ‘too’ anything is to authenticate and fortify power, broadly speaking, as the proper province of men.” (p 158)

Why I chose it: The premise is pretty cool.

Review:
I read this book while on vacation, and so was able to consume it chapter by chapter, reading pretty much each one in its entirety. I highly recommend going that route, because each section can stand alone as its own story and analysis.

Ms. Petersen’s premise is that there are many different ways that women can be ‘too’ something for society, and that some women use that as a means to fight the systems that oppress us. Specifically, she looks at being too strong, fat, gross, slutty, old, pregnant, shrill, queer, loud, and naked, and associates one woman with each of these characteristics. She recognizes that her list is overwhelmingly white (80%), cis (90%), and straight (unclear how each woman identifies, but I’d say probably in the 80-90% range). Given that, she can’t get too deep into any one area because by picking a representative archetype of the ‘too’ characteristic, she necessarily ends up limiting herself.

But that’s not to say that each chapter only looks at the woman she chooses. Some focus more on the specific woman than others, but each does explore the broader implications of some other individuals who have faced down the condemnation around the unruly behavior (e.g. she discusses Roseann Barr in the ‘too fat’ section that focuses on Melissa McCarthy).

The chapter that I found the must anger-inducing is probably the Serena Williams one, because she has been treated so blatantly unfairly over the years, from the sexism to the racism to the misogynoir. She’s robably the greatest athlete of all time, but, y’know, she has muscles and is a black woman, so of course she gets a ton of shit. I also was a bit teary-eyed after reading the Hillary Clinton chapter (’too shrill,’ because of course); that does not bode well for when I pick up her book next week.

What I found interesting was that, for the vast majority of the sections, Ms. Petersen seems to be on the side of the woman fighting the system. She’s picked someone who is kind of like ‘fuck you, I’m going to do what I want’ to fit the adjectives, and explores how these women have done it in a supportive manner. She is a bit ambivalent in the Melissa McCarthy chapter, but even that one she does see McCarthy as generally not caring about her size in a way that sees her obsessing over reducing it. I suppose she’s also more critical in the Caitlyn Jenner chapter (’too queer’), but overall makes a strong argument.

But the stand-out exception to me is the chapter on Madonna (’too old’). In the other chapters, Ms. Petersen makes argument about how these women are fighting back and don’t give a fuck, but she takes real issue with how Madonna has chosen to represent that. Her analysis is primarily that by choosing to be so into keeping her body fit, Madonna is not rebelling against age, but simply conforming to the ideas of beauty. Which … perhaps? But this analysis doesn’t fit well with the rest of the book. I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had there - is it more harmful to fight the system by keeping one’s body fit into one’s 60s and demand to be seen as sexy, or to lessen one’s regular workouts so that one can age in a more ‘traditional’ way and then demand to be seen as sexy? I’m not entirely sure, and I don’t think Ms. Petersen is either, which is why I feel like this chapter either belongs in another book, or she should have picked a different woman to represent that adjective, given how the same analysis doesn’t seem to hold in the other chapters.

I still recommend this book despite the three stars (usually I go with four+ for my strong recommendations) as I think there is some interesting cultural commentary here.

[jmchshannon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Anne Helen Petersen is my new hero and her book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud is my newest manifesto. Each of the women she investigates is someone who has been vilified in the media, sometimes for nothing more than for her appearance. Yet, as she details, each of them continue to do her own thing, thereby breaking down barriers and providing opportunities for women to follow in their footsteps without the scrutiny and derision. It is difficult not to take these stories and use them as inspiration to be unruly in your own life.

As Ms. Petersen takes a detailed look at various women who have upset the status quo in recent years, she shines a light on just what that status quo is. She does not just focus her scrutiny on the easily-seen aspects of it but gets down into the nuances of exactly what bothers people about these women. The chapter on Hillary Rodham Clinton was particularly eye-opening for me, as she explains the vehemence behind the hatred towards her in a way that makes sense but also sheds light on the very hidden misogyny at its heart.

Misogyny is at the heart of every chapter in the book, which comes as no surprise. What is surprising is the lengths to which people will go in order to pretend otherwise. What makes it even worse is the societal criticism women throw at other women, all in the name of some unspoken and impossible ideal that was created by someone somewhere and has been established as the norm. As Ms. Petersen shows, sometimes women are the worst enemies of other women, especially unruly ones.

Each chapter within Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud is essentially an essay on the chosen celebrity and her “crimes” against society. This makes it easy to read and digest everything Ms. Petersen uncovers and challenges. The desire to take notes, highlight passages, or mark certain sections with comments like “YES!” or “OMG, this happens to me!” is overwhelming, making the separate chapters a welcome natural pause.

As more and more people recognize and express disgust at the way women and people of color are treated in society today, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud is important in helping us identify underlying attitudes that are not always as obvious as one might think. Understanding the reasons for such vilification is important in striking back at it and being able to overcome it. Taking inspiration from any one of the women recognized and applauded by Ms. Petersen for her unruly behavior will help us all unleash our own unruliness. Only then can we make changes to the status quo.