Can Women Really Be "Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud"?
What do Hillary Clinton, Kim Kardashian, and Serena Williams have in common? might sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but it's the central question of Anne Helen Petersen's raucous and smart new book, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman (Plume)-10 essays, each focusing on a famous woman (and, in one case, a pair of women) whose muchness provokes public outrage. "Every few decades, an unruly female celebrity inflames the popular consciousness," writes Petersen, a BuzzFeed culture writer who dipped her toe in these waters in her first book, 2014's critically acclaimed Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama From the Golden Age of American Cinema. "What distinguishes our current cultural moment, then, is how thoroughly 'unruly' women have come to dominate the zeitgeist." The book's title refers to, respectively, actress Melissa McCarthy, rapper Nicki Minaj, and author Jennifer Weiner; other antiheroines include Serena Williams (too strong), Lena Dunham (too naked), and Hillary Clinton (too shrill). Because these criticisms are, writ large, the same ones flung daily at nonceleb women, the book is a timely and essential read.
Too Fat is a study of women who are, as Petersen writes, "threatening to the status quo," whether that's author Jennifer Weiner insisting that her writing is dismissed because she's female, or Nicki Minaj regularly calling out interviewers for being condescending or unprepared. "If you know an artist is about to come on your show and you know she just put out a video," she asked a radio host in 2012 who hadn't seen Minaj's newly released video for her single "Freedom," "what would make you not watch it?" Petersen's analytical skills are as vigorous as her prose and reporting are entertaining, and her engagement with writing by fellow critics and thinkers (such as feminist scholar bell hooks, New York Times Magazine critic Jody Rosen, and cultural polymath Nora Ephron) opens up a dialogue about what we talk about when we talk about disruptive women. "Celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work," Petersen writes, "the way we pinpoint and police representations of everything from blackness to queerness, from femininity to pregnancy."
She's at her best when unpacking pointed groundswells of criticism, as she does in the chapter on Kim Kardashian and her highly visible, "unruly" first pregnancy-unruly because she refused to wear traditional maternity clothes, even after the weight gain that accompanied her early-onset preeclampsia, a serious condition. Petersen uses the tabloid coverage of Kardashian's body ("Would someone please tell Kim she's pregnant?" jibes one headline; another piece pairs a photo of her in a black-and-white dress next to a photo of an orca whale: "Who wore it better?") as a springboard to explore America's position on public pregnancy in recent history, contrasting the Motion Picture Association's 1953 veto of the word pregnant from the The Moon Is Blue script with the watershed image of ultrapregnant and naked Demi Moore on a 1991 cover of Vanity Fair. That Kardashian's pregnant body is displayed on newsstands and on TV is a sign of progress, certainly, but it's double-edged: There are now standards for attractive and unattractive ways to carry a child, and even one of the richest women in the world couldn't escape the critique that she should either cover herself up or, better, stay home for nine months.
For their myriad bignesses, each of the women in the book-all of them success stories-also possesses more traditionally lauded qualities that offset nonmainstream appearances or unladylike language. Petersen notes that this isn't a new bifurcation, and that's true: In historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, Ulrich points out that while Rosa Parks is remembered for her revolutionary act against segregation, the NAACP pushed her into the spotlight after she refused to give up her seat on that bus because of her perfect reputation. As one review of Ulrich's book put it, "It behooves an ambitious woman to be judicious in her misbehavior." Caitlyn Jenner, Petersen writes, is on this continuum for her nonconformity to cisgenderness; yet she's also a "transnormative" (read: able to "pass") trans woman because she has the cash and drive to perform ultrafemininity.
Woe to the woman who won't, or can't, dial it back. "There are hundreds of women in the public sphere who don't exercise such careful modulation," Petersen writes, "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." She cites, for example, Lea DeLaria, who showed up in 1993 as the first openly gay comic-a self-described "unapologetically butch" lesbian, in fact-on late-night TV. She then wandered in the comedy wilderness for two decades, before finally being cast in 2013 in Orange Is the New Black.
There are more unruly women who are straight and white in our consciousness than there are gay or trans women, or women of color, to whom the culture assigns notoriety because of their look. "The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine," Petersen quotes Claudia Rankine in a 2015 New York Times Magazine profile of Serena Williams. The tennis great is Petersen's "most unruly" of women-and in many ways, the hopeful center of this book: "Tennis hasn't changed; sports haven't changed; the way that we talk about strong women hasn't changed.… And yet: through sheer force of her presence, her enduring unruliness, her excellence, Williams has begun to change them all."
This article originally appears in the June 2017 issue of ELLE.
You Might Also Like
