Are We Overreacting?

A Response to Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

by Lia James ‘21

Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud. Image courtesy of Amazon.

CW: discussion of a racial slur

Anne Helen Petersen has a voice. She is a writer. She has a platform. She is white. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, she uses her voice to tell the stories and highlight the intersecting identities of eleven women who are unacceptable to American society for one reason or another—women who are “unruly,” as Petersen calls them many times. Petersen lauds these women’s rebelliousness while also highlighting their privilege. Whether it be race, class, sexuality, religious identity, or any number of other qualifiers, each of these women has a quality that allows her to cross boundaries that she may not otherwise have the social license to cross.

Petersen does a lot right. In her second chapter, “Too Fat,” she discusses the nuances of Melissa McCarthy’s balance between the roles she plays and her “real” self. She highlights the privilege McCarthy has as a white, Christian woman, while at the same time praising her for embracing her platform to diversify the American understanding of what a woman can look like and how a woman can act. In “Too Gross,” Petersen hails Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of Broad City for their deconstruction and reimagination of a young metropolitan woman’s bodily autonomy, and in the same breath highlights their “privilege to fuck around” as millenials who live in an “escapable” version of “economic precarity.” Expanding on this critique, Petersen explains the ways in which Jacobson and Glazer took commentary about their privilege as an opportunity to educate themselves and began incorporating that understanding and interrogation into later seasons of their show.  

Petersen tells ten stories of complex, infinitely layered women: women who transgress, women who overstep, women who make mistakes, and women who learn from those mistakes. It is a refreshing book. It is a book that may be more palatable to certain (white, privileged) audiences—and may have a more receptive readership—because of who Petersen is. In her own words from the book’s introduction: 

“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… I’m straight and cisgender. I attended a good college and went on to pursue a Ph.D.”

No writer is without bias, and Petersen’s introduction is a laudable effort to position herself as a woman with privilege in a discussion of unruliness. Her intentions are admirable. Her voice shines through, and not only because I listened to this work as an audiobook. The rise of the audiobook has married authors’ literal voices to their writing voices. Hearing Petersen herself state her position in the quote above gave me the briefest moment of pause, wondering if this acknowledgement of privilege did enough to justify her telling others’ stories. I dismissed this feeling, thinking I had been oversteeped in the language and sensibilities of social justice. Petersen was just being an ally, and a good one at that.

As the introduction ended and Petersen began reciting the first chapter, “Too Strong,” I completely let go of my half-formed thoughts about her positionality as I became engrossed in her well-written, well-read, and aptly analyzed discussion of Serena Williams’s rise to superstardom and struggles thereafter. 

The beauty of audiobooks is that you can listen to them while folding laundry. When your phone buzzes with an [ACTION REQUIRED] email, however, your reverie might be broken. I allowed the email to distract me from my laundry and my listening, responding to the message and then, unbothered, hitting play. The first of Petersen’s words to hit my ears were: 

“[N-word], stay away from here, we don’t want you here.”

Except Petersen hadn’t said “n-word.” This well-spoken, confident, caring, socially sensitive woman had said the hard “r” n-word at full volume into my ears. My stomach clenched. I had a moment of cognitive dissonance. For a few seconds, I let the recording run without really hearing what Petersen was saying. I mentally tuned back in as she praised the Williams family’s “ability to articulate the racism and exclusion the family had experienced for years.” Then, I hit pause. I rewound the track, and I landed a few seconds before the moment that had taken me so aback. I hit play. I hit rewind. I hit play again. I repeated this pattern until I was finally able to listen to her point without cringing at hearing the n-word in this white woman’s mouth.

Of course, Petersen had been reading a quote, spoken by Serena Williams’s father. She had been recounting, in great detail, a pivotal experience in the lives of the Williams sisters. She was quoting. She was explaining. She was making a point. So why were my palms so sweaty all of a sudden?

It’s because that word doesn’t belong to her. Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud is a boundary-crossing book. It may serve quite well to teach people who would not otherwise recognize their own biases and prejudice to self-reflect. Yet the people Petersen is reaching, the people whose minds she is trying to change, have now heard her say the n-word without reservation. One may argue whether including the word in the written version of the book is crossing a line. Regardless, hearing the word in her own voice moved something in me. In not censoring herself in the audiobook (something that, to me, seems a simple enough task), Petersen has normalized it. She has okayed it. She has set a precedent. 

I wondered if I was overreacting. What Petersen writes (and says) directly after that quote further fueled my concern: “there’s been debate over whether the use of racial epithets can be substantiated—Venus, for her part, said, ‘I heard what he heard,’ but no one else reported hearing similar insults.” In other words, it’s possible that Williams’s father did not hear that word at all. It’s possible that he had been mistaken. It’s possible that he was projecting. But Petersen did say it. I heard it. You can hear it too, with a monthly subscription to Audible. 

Acknowledgement of a weapon’s wrongness should not grant one the authority to wield it. Maybe Petersen wondered whether or not she should censor herself in her audiobook recording. Maybe she didn’t give it a second thought. Whatever the case, it is clear what decision she made. She took a word that has been and continues to be harmful to generations of people—some of whom she celebrates and elevates in her book—and consciously or unconsciously took ownership of it. The n-word is not a word to be tiptoed around. It is a word to be eliminated from the vocabulary of those who have historically had the power to use it to tyrannize others. 

“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.”

Petersen is all of those things. She’s right: it is far different for a white woman to make people uncomfortable. Maybe that’s why there is a pit in my stomach as I write this conclusion. It’s because I now know that I’m not overreacting, yet I’ve been told all my life that it isn’t my place to make people uncomfortable. Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud has shown me otherwise. Petersen did a great job with her book. She showed me some of my own biases. She encouraged my unruliness. She highlighted points that I had not even considered. And she let me down. 

Lia James ‘21 (ljames3) spends her time attempting to write herself into her most compelling realities. From the February 2020 issue.