“...unruliness can be viewed as an amplification of anger about a climate that publicly embraces equality but does little to enact change. It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and go we actually behave.”

Naming nearly a dozen famous women including Serena Williams, Hilary Clinton, Madonna, Lena Dunham, and Melissa McCarthy, Anne Helen Petersen compiled what bound together becomes a collection of case studies on the American woman and how even, or especially, when aligned with their celebrity, these women of various occupations & backgrounds are judged vehemently by the public and the press. The aforementioned women are respectively vilified for being too strong, too shrill, too old, too naked, and too fat.

Author Jennifer Weiner also got a chapter (Too Loud) which I loved not just for how it addresses both the whiteness of and double standard re: gender in publishing, but also how it spoke of chick lit. It really made me consider how cool it is that women write with women readers in mind about women living independent lives while also maybe falling in love (maybe over and over, maybe not at all but just having a lot of sex) and how unnecessarily denigrated romance novels are.

I loved how prescient every detail was and how heavy every essay landed. It made sense that Petersen chose these recognizable names because ideally, reading these thorough depictions will make you rethink how you yourself may have previously been too harsh in making assumptions. It may not be that now you will totally come around on loving Lena Dunham, but that you might simply have a better understanding on her artistic pursuits and how some media representations of her went too far. My hope is that any reader of this book, man or woman but especially women, will allow Petersen to persuade you to at least be less judgmental to yourself and your friends and start to turn more kindness outward to all women no matter what they look like, because if we are going to call ourselves out in being too whatever that only gives the power back to strangers (and the patriarchy) to continue to sweep us up with a broad brush that deems us less than for simply being, well, not a man.

“Their bodies, words, and actions have become a locus for the type of inflammatory rhetoric usually reserved only for political figures. It’s as if each of these women is constantly ignoring the line of acceptable behavior: you don’t know where it is until she steps over it, at which point it bursts into flames.”