Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

This is the first book Book Riot chose for Persist, their Feminist Book Club. I only just learned about the book club, so I'm reading the first two books before diving into the third. (Second book is Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper, and the third book is Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahawy.) I really wish I could have read this book with their book club, as it definitely would benefit from being able to discuss each chapter with other readers.

The book is divided into chapters focusing on individual women and what they are guilty of being too much of. So Too Strong - Serena Williams, or Too Shrill - Hillary Clinton, or Too Slutty - Nicki Minaj. Then it dives deeply into why people think the woman embodies that negative, and often, what the woman herself thinks of it. We get cultural background on the adjective; in Too Pregnant, Petersen examines how celebrity pregnancies have changed how we treat pregnant women - how pregnancy has changed from something to be hidden to something to be valued and publicized and adored. But when someone isn't pregnant in the right way - Kim Kardashian, for instance, suffered from swollen feet and preeclampsia and general misery and “poor” fashion choices - we judge them for it.

Too Loud delves into the world of publishing and book reviewing, profiling Jennifer Weiner's fight against sexism in publishing. The chapter educates us on how the genre of “chick lit” started, and how women authors and readers are too often relegated to “chick lit” when if the same story had been written by a man, about a man instead of a woman, it would just be “literature” and eligible for review by things like the The New York Times Book Review.

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud was a highly educational look at pop culture and how women are judged much harsher than men are for showing the same traits. It is imminently readable - I only started to fall asleep once, and I think that's more because I only slept four hours last night! I had a fiction book on the table beside me, ready to dive into when I needed a break from the nonfiction - it's still there, untouched. This is a great book, but I'd definitely read it as part of a book club or a buddy read if you can. Get a friend to read it so you can discuss it!

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

I was psyched when I found out Anne Helen Petersen, who does amazing writing on celebrity for Buzzfeed, was writing a book, Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud, about women who transgress our social norms. Who among us hasn't stepped outside the lines, peeked out from inside the box and felt blowback for it? Who hasn't looked at the women who do get out there and live out there and regarded them with a curious mixture of revulsion and envy? Petersen highlights nine (well, ten, as one pair is addressed in the same essay) “unruly” women, focusing on how each in turn has challenged the expectations we place on lady people. Many of these challenges focus on the body, from Serena Williams' “too strong” frame to Madonna's refusal to cover up because she's “too old” to Caitlyn Jenner's “too queer” gender confirmation surgery. There are also women who make other choices they're not supposed to: Hilary Clinton might be smart and ambitious, but she's “too shrill”, and Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer (the Broad City team) make us uncomfortable because they're “too gross”.

I wanted this book to be amazing and mind-blowing and incredible. And it was good! Petersen's writing is lively and insightful and serious without being ponderous. But I think maybe it would have worked better if it had been split into two volumes, one focusing on body and one focusing on personality. The essays felt like they skimmed the surface, taking a shallow dive into concepts that deserve deeper thought and analysis that I would have loved to read Petersen's take on. In writing about how Nicki Minaj is “too slutty”, for example, Petersen refers to and gives some brief background on how black female bodies are sexualized and fetishized. But there's so much there that because the book needed to be a reasonable length and there are eight other subjects, she doesn't really have space to really give it the full context it deserves. I felt the same way, perhaps even more strongly, about the chapter on Jenner and trans issues. It would have felt problematic to leave the gender binary untouched entirely, but to only briefly interact with it doesn't feel quite right either.

One essay, though, that really made me think was the piece about “too loud” Jennifer Weiner, who won't just quietly accept the judgment of her writing about women and their lives (which, to be perfectly honest, I don't personally much care for) as mere “chick lit” not to be taken seriously. I know I fall into that trap with my own reading, disdaining titles with pastel covers or shoes and shopping bags prominently displayed. There's not a good reason why I, or we, treat stories about women's lives and problems, written by women, as lesser than books written by and about men. This was just one of the instances of reflection prompted by this book, and though it does have issues, it's very worth reading if you want to take some time to interact with your conceptions of womanhood.