Booksellers recommend: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

We’re all really enjoying Anne Helen Petersen’s collection of essays, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, and can’t wait to have her here in just a week on July 19th at 7pm. Check out our reviews and come join us!

I’ve enjoyed Anne Helen Petersen’s essays on Buzzfeed, so it was great to read this interesting and well-written collection exploring the sexism surrounding important figures in pop culture, politics and sports such as Lena Dunham, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Serena Williams. She poses interesting questions and forces you to consider your own opinions about female celebrities you may not particularly like (or maybe just me). Smart and well researched.

— Eugenia Vela

Academic essays about my favorite celebrities and how they are working to tear down the nefarious systems that be by not only existing in ways our society deems reprehensible, but doing it in the loudest, most public ways possible? Sign me UP! I love Peterson’s argumentative style, which considers her particular subject and its implications from all angles (as a true intellectual of the internet age is smart to do), but I also love that this is a book I’d happily read in between leaps into Barton Springs. Summer reading at its finest.

— Molly Moore

This book earned Anne Helen Petersen a spot on the shelf next to other noteworthy feminist writers such as Roxane Gay and Rebecca Solnit. From cover to conclusion I was enthralled with in-depth analysis that include a variety of intersections of gender and identity. I must admit, I am inspired to become a little bit more unruly.

— Hanna Foster

To be fair, you often can judge a book by its cover, but this was a definite exception. I saw “culture writer at Buzzfeed” and I was ready to dismiss this as pop-feminist pabulum, but I was very wrong. Petersen presents ten academic and thoughtful case studies of women whose public personas and aspirations are, despite illusions otherwise, still very much an affront to our notions of how to correctly exist within gender norms. Serena Williams is “too strong”; Nicki Minaj, “too slutty”; Hillary Clinton, “too shrill; Madonna, “too old”. They’re not always examples of how best to revolt against these norms, but our aversion to them is the telling thing. Even if you consider yourself woke and enlightened, I bet you’ve had a moment when you’ve thought, “Alright, Madonna, alright, Kim Kardashian, ENOUGH,” and this book is a great opportunity to confront what that means.

— Julia Hebner