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Anne Helen Petersen QUOTES

Anne Helen Petersen QUOTES

21 " To be an unruly woman today is to oscillate between the postures of fearlessness and self-doubt, between listening to the voices that tell a woman she is too much and one’s own, whispering and yelling I am already enough, and always have been. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

22 " few things enrage, confuse, and repulse audiences more than the suggestion that the primary visual purpose of a woman’s body is not the pleasure of men. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

23 " Hence, the policing of the female athlete, who faces the daunting task of maintaining a body strong enough to excel at her sport of choice but contained enough so as not to incite fear about transcending her given place in the world. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

24 " The crafting of the face is a billion-dollar industry because there’s actually only one truly acceptable face to create: that of “the girl.” The girl’s face is always dewy, unblemished, and unwrinkled, her eyes bright, her forehead uncreased. “Womanly” hips and ass might be theoretically fetishized, but they’re desirable only when the rest of the body remains that of the girl. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

25 " A recommitment to and cherishing of oneself isn’t self-care, or self-centeredness, at least not in the contemporary connotations of those words. Instead, it’s a declaration of value: not because you labor, not because you consume, not because you produce, but simply because you are. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

26 " The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being. Adulting therefore becomes a verb. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

27 " Femininity cloaked power and strength, made it more palatable, less threatening. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

28 " It’s a tendency that reflects the age-old understanding that (white) men can contain multitudes, while members of every other group are pitted against themselves, as if there can be only one show about black families, or queer dudes, or, in the case of Broad City and Girls, young women. Jacobson "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

29 " ...a far more palatable - and, in many cases, more successful - form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom...they've built tremendously successful brands by embracing the 'new domesticity,' defined by consumption, maternity, and a sort of twenty-first century gentility. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

30 " We’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore every signal from the body saying This is too much, and we call that conditioning “grit” or “hustle. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

31 " Celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work: the way we pinpoint and police representations of everything from blackness to queerness, from femininity to pregnancy. Which is why the success of these unruly women is inextricable from the confluence of attitudes toward women in the 2010s: the public reembrace of feminism set against a backdrop of increased legislation of women’s bodies, the persistence of the income gap, the policing of how women’s bodies should look and act in public, and the election of Trump. Through this lens, 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 how we actually behave. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

32 " you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t. Try too hard, and you’re disgusting; don’t try at all, and you’re invisible. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

33 " The poor and people of color are yoked to the abject; white people use its exploration as a path toward self-liberation. It’s a valid critique—and one that Broad City has increasingly interrogated, suggesting, especially in later seasons, the extent of Abbi and Ilana’s privilege. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

34 " Rest doesn’t just make workers happier, but makes them more efficient when they’re actually on the job. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

35 " Women can consider themselves free, feminist, and liberated in so many ways-- yet still be controlled by the notion of an ideal body of which their own continually falls short. "

― Anne Helen Petersen

36 " Women suppress a lot of their sides. It's a form of "code-switching"--a term to describe how one speaks and behaves differently in order to match an intended audience. Code switching is, at heart, a survival mechanism: a way of showing, at any particular moment, that you fit in, you're not a threat, you belong. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

37 " Why have I worked all the time since actually finding one? Because I’m terrified of losing it, and because my value as a worker and my value as a person have become intractably intertwined. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

38 " Feministing writer Jos Truitt puts it, “trans women are disrespected and treated terribly when they don’t pass, but if they do pass they’re called out for upholding the gender binary and cis standards of beauty. It is an impossible bind.”13 "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

39 " that’s the thing about American governmental intervention: When it’s effective, it’s enveloped in a narrative of “American ingenuity and hard work”; when it’s ineffective, it’s proof of the fundamentally immoral nature of government assistance. "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

40 " See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It "

― Anne Helen Petersen , Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation