From now on, whenever anyone asks me to explain my affection for Nicki Minaj, Hillary Clinton, or Serena Williams, I’m going to force them to read Anne Helen Petersen’s new book, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman. While reading it, I was overcome by a near-constant urge to get the word “unruly” tattooed on my actual skin, because Petersen has encapsulated something so profound, so elemental, so obvious that I almost felt like I’d known it intrinsically, but had heretofore lacked the language and theoretical context to truly articulate it.
She’s done this through 10 case studies of perfectionist workaholic women—also including Lena Dunham, Madonna, Caitlyn Jenner, and Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer—whose careers have been marked in some way by unruliness, and whose importance to history isn’t tempered by the abjection they inspire in others. Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud more than supports its thesis that the future belongs to women who claim space as subjects in their own lives, rather than objects in the lives of men