In the seventh century B.C., the poet Semonides of Amorgos wrote a catalog of unmanageable women. First, there are the women who resemble pigs, “resting in filth and growing fat.” Other women, he writes, are yapping dogs, who won’t shut up even if you knock their teeth out. And then there are the lazy horses, slutty weasels and ugly apes with no necks. The only kind of woman he praises is the bee — industrious, devoted and, most importantly, fertile.
Now, 3,000 years later, everything is different, and nothing is different.
In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen has written her own catalog of unruly women: celebrities and other cultural figures who have been called too strong, too fat, too gross, too slutty, too old, too pregnant, too shrill, too queer, too loud and too naked for uncomplicated cultural acceptance. She ranges from Serena Williams (too strong) to Lena Dunham (too naked) and shows how each woman defies norms while still staying close enough to the edges of respectability to achieve mainstream success. {read}