312. Unruly Women, Camouflaging Misogyny, and Controlling Our Narratives: An Interview with Anne Helen Petersen

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Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 312 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me this week is Anne Helen Petersen. I am really excited about this interview, and I did my best to keep my inner thirteen-year-old under control; I hope I did so. The paperback edition of Anne Helen Petersen’s book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman came out on August 7th. I reviewed the hardcover version of this book, and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m also a massive fan of Anne Helen’s writing. So I had the opportunity to ask her about the book and about her work on celebrity. We talk about the narrative of celebrity image and how women are seizing control of their own stories. Her book is about unruly women who disrupt the world around them in unique and powerful ways, and so our conversation is about how women continue to disrupt everything. We talk about political unruliness, celebrity unruliness, and the way young women are challenging the questions that they are asked and refusing to tolerate behavior that they don’t like, and how that is very inspiring to us both. We also discuss the labor of constantly reframing the narrative around yourself to highlight the misogyny and sexism that inform those narratives. Anne Helen says some very incredible and thought-provoking things about hiding and cloaking the ideology of misogyny; that part is definitely the highlight of the interview for me. We also touch on what she’s working on now, including political coverage of the midterm elections from her base in Montana, and her interest in writing about country music.

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The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the show as to who this is and where you can find it for your very self. And at the end of every episode I also have a terrible joke, and this week’s joke is really, really bad; I’m very excited about it.

We talk about a lot of Anne Helen’s writing, and so in the podcast show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast I will have links to her Twitter feed, her columns at BuzzFeed, her articles on Longform, and some of the profiles that we mention that we talk about in this episode. I will also have a link to her TinyLetter. I mentioned that I was a fan of her writing; I very much am because, much like looking at romance fiction, I think looking at celebrity and the way that we talk about celebrity women is very illuminating, and the way in which women’s stories are codified and packaged for us as celebrity stories is also really interesting. So I would very humbly encourage you to take a look at Anne Helen Petersen’s TinyLetter, because the way in which she analyzes the things that we talk about is really interesting, and it’s one of my favorite things to read.

I am so excited about this interview, so let’s get to it! Let’s do this podcast!

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Sarah: Thank you so much for doing this interview. My inner thirteen-year-old is freaking out right now –

Anne Helen Petersen: [Laughs]

Sarah: – because I loved your book, and I’m a huge fan of your writing, so I’m going to try to keep my squee to a bare minimum, but –

Anne Helen: I love it!

Sarah: – thank you for what you do. What you do is so cool!

Anne Helen: It, it is cool, and it was never what I thought I was going to be doing, like, when I was growing up.

[Laughter]

Anne Helen: Not at all.

Sarah: So your publicist pitched me your, the updated version –

Anne Helen: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud. I read the hardcover version, and I now understand that you’ve added new chapters. Can you tell me about these updates?

Anne Helen: Well, it’s not so much chapters. As much as I would love to – like, the thing about writing about celebrity is that as soon as I, like, sent in the final draft, there was more that needed to be updated, so I just had to kind of –

Sarah: Of course!

Anne Helen: – let it be. Like, Nicki Minaj is not dating Meek Mill and hasn’t for quite some time now. No, the, it’s more, I wrote, like, like an afterword?

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Anne Helen: And that ties together some of what I think has happened in terms of unruliness post Trump’s election. So, like, I already had to totally revise my introduction after Trump was elected and –

Sarah: Yep.

Anne Helen: – the Hillary Clinton chapter? You know, that was, I, the election happened, and then I had already submitted, like, the final drafts, and then my editor and I were like, welp, we’ve got to change that!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: So we, we went back and, and, you know, changed some parts of it: the intro and the Hillary Clinton chapter, that sort of thing. But this new chapter, I guess – it’s like a, you know, a half chapter – is really trying to tie together, you know, both what has happened in terms of the women’s movement, like, you know, women’s marches and, and that sort of thing and women being involved in politics, but also, like, what has happened with #MeToo, which I think is energy. Like, to say out loud that you will no longer put up with this sort of behavior from men, like, that’s an incredible act of unruliness, and I see that very much as part and parcel of this reaction to what happened with Trump’s election.

Sarah: Absolutely, and the, the motivation of seeing someone else do that and being able to say, yeah, not only that, but also this thing as well –

Anne Helen: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Sarah: – and adding onto it. I know that, from the press release I got, that you’ve also, you also talk a little bit about Cardi B, Beyoncé, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What do you say about them?

Anne Helen: Well, again – [laughs] – that’s, like, what I can talk about? Like, what I can talk with you about? It’s not, they’re not part of the updated book, which –

Sarah: Ah, okay, so tell me everything because, like, I saw those three names and was like, just tell me all the things that you’re thinking about those people. Who cares how long this episode is?

Anne Helen: [Laughs] I mean, like, all of those people, like, I could write a chapter about them right now.

Sarah: Gosh, yes!

Anne Helen: And all of them are really disrupting in different ways. Like, you know, like, the Nicki Minaj chapter, not to say that, like, every Black rapper, female rapper is the same, but, like, I think a lot of the conversations that we had about Nicki Minaj’s unruliness have shifted and, and transformed a little bit to talk about Cardi B’s unruliness? You know, because she’s in some ways superseding and, you know, replacing isn’t the word, but has become more of the, the person that we talk about when we talk about female rappers?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: But then also, like, how the feud between the two women, or, like, how there’s this thought that, like, oh, there can only be one female rapper, which obviously is, like, just incredibly untrue. Like, no one’s like, oh there can only be one male rapper. It’s like, no, there’s this whole pantheon of rappers at any given moment, but the women have to be pitted against each other. But yeah, I think, and you know, just any, any number of women who are running for political office, and especially, like, ones who are running as, you know, socialists – [laughs] – and are saying, like, listen, this isn’t a radical thought; like, it’s not radical to be, to, to offer these, these claims or these promises as a political candidate, and I’m confident in them. I think that that is incredibly unruly.

Sarah: And it’s also breaking with a, a particular political narrative?

Anne Helen: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And a particular system where you say, actually, no, I’m not going to be part of the Democratic party process; I’m going to do my own thing with an entirely new group of people, and, like, everyone is shocked when that worked.

Anne Helen: Totally! Well, and also saying, like, oh, well, I don’t want to talk shit about these other candidates.

Sarah: Yeah!

Anne Helen: The fact that that – [laughs] – that, that not playing by the typical, like, oh, well, you should, you know, you should say bad things about not only established Democrats but also, like, the whole Hillary style? Like, what we’re, what we expect is for Democrats, and especially Democratic women to, you know, to shit on each other, and I think that if you’re a different way and a more effective way but still that is viewed as different and unruly, like, is to say, well, actually, like, I respect them, but we’re, I’m trying to do something different.

Sarah: Yeah. One thing I noticed especially is Cardi B is twenty-five years old –

Anne Helen: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight years old!

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: I did not know anything at that age, and I certainly did not know enough to articulate an, an, an alternate path for myself doing something like they have done at that age. Now I’m forty-three, and I can do that now because, you know, I have, you know, two more decades of, okay, this is the system, and I’m going to opt out, and I’m not going to do it. Seeing someone at that age do something so massive and be so unruly is not only very inspiring, but it is jaw-dropping to me!

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: Do you think that this is a commonality? I mean, obviously two is a trend, because – it’s not, but – [laughs] – is it, is it possible that unruliness is more and more prevalent among younger women who are like, you know what? How ‘bout no?

Anne Helen: Yeah, I do think so. I mean, I think the other thing, if you think about it, you know, we grew up in the ‘90s when there was this –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: – incredible backlash towards feminism and towards any sort of unruliness.

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: I just wrote about, did this big deep dive into Gwen Stefani, and the, the ways in which in some ways she was unruly, right? Like, just the way that she dressed and that sort of thing, like, seemed to eighth-grade me as unruly, but it was very –

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: – superficial, and I don’t mean that as, like, fake; I mean that as, it was on the surface level, and I think that that was the message that I really internalized was that, like, it’s weird to be a feminist; it’s weird to advocate for yourself; it’s weird to do things that don’t place you firmly within a conception of, like, commodity purchasing – [laughs] –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – and, and femininity, and – so for a lot of these women, and you know, they’re, like, so, they’re about, let’s see, like, ten, twelve, fifteen years behind us –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – they came of age just when feminism was starting to be cool again, so –

Sarah: Yep.

Anne Helen: – some of those messages and some of those freedoms were more of available to them. And also just growing up with the internet, you know, like, think of all the things that were not available to us because we –

Sarah: Yes! Thank you!

Anne Helen: – didn’t necessarily have access to them. You know, so, like, whether – there’s so many different ways that that can take place; it doesn’t necessarily mean, like, oh, I was reading Rookie when I was a teen. You know, like, that’s kind of a very straightforward means of accessing feminism? Like, there are other ways when you have the internet of just, like, being exposed to different types of people and different models of femininity that I, were just, like, almost completely unavailable to me.

Sarah: Oh, me too, and the language that I have learned and the ways that I have un-, come to understand different people have changed exponentially in the past few years. Like, if you would have asked me five or six years ago what cisgendered meant, I would have been like, I do not know. Genders that are sisters, maybe?

Anne Helen: [Laughs]

Sarah: Like, I would not have known; that was not a term that had ever been part of my daily vernacular. Now I understand it much, much better, and being able, I think, as a young person to log on and not only find people who love the same things you love but also feel the same way you feel about things is both very empowering and also can be very isolating at the same time. To see young women grab that commonality and be like, I know that there are other people who feel this way, it’s, it’s, it’s like the first person who steps out is immediately followed by someone else going, yes! Okay, let’s do this!

Anne Helen: Yeah, and also –

Sarah: So inspiring!

Anne Helen: – have conversations about it that sophisticate your understanding even more. You know –

Sarah: Oh yes.

Anne Helen: – be that if I did find information about something that was interesting to me, it was very one-, like, one-directional. So, like, I would read an article, but it’s not like I could have a conversation about it, and I think that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – what forums for teens, whether it’s Tumblr or just, like, comments sections or – I think that they provide a space, if you do want to work through some of your thoughts, not even consciously but, like, working through identity and your, and how you feel about a different celebrity. Not to say that it’s all, like, super positive and constructive? Like –

Sarah: No.

Anne Helen: – you know, teenage girls are teenage girls, but I do think that there’s just much more availability of these sorts of images, these sorts of ideas.

Sarah: I know I find it very hopeful, for example, that you have young girls coming into teenage-dom where they’re sort of beginning to grapple with sexuality and grappling with visible signs of sexuality that they can’t control, and that is an age when things can get really toxic in a hurry, and now it feels to me that they have so many more positive assets to engage with that are like, yes, this is horrible, and it stinks, and here is why, and here’s what you can do to take back control.

Anne Helen: Yeah. Absolutely.

Sarah: The one thing I loved about your book was the idea that unruliness has a lot to do with control, that people are, seem like they’re being unruly and out of control and out of bounds, when actually what they’re doing is demanding that they control their narrative.

Anne Helen: Right! Right! Yeah, and, like, that they – and that’s why it’s scary, right? ‘Cause if –

Sarah: Yeah!

Anne Helen: – difficult being out of control, or it feels like others are out of control when, you’re right, like, what it is is that they are determining their own pathway instead of staying on that pathway that has been determined for them.

Sarah: One of the ways I find it fascinating that your work sort of intersects is that you look at all these women who are demanding control of, of their, their own narratives in many ways, but you’re also looking at celebrity culture, which is, like, like, nine different parties trying to control a narrative, because that always works out; narrative by committee is always a success!

Anne Helen: [Laughs]

Sarah: What are some of the parallels you see between the women who you look at as unruly and the women who are so very controlled within or by the narratives about them? Like, I know you’ve written considerably about Jennifer Lawrence –

Anne Helen: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and how she’s still somewhat controlled by a narrative about her that started when she was twenty-two, and she’s having trouble getting out of it.

Anne Helen: Yeah. I mean, that’s, it’s such a hard thing, because, you know, I get, whenever I write about a celebrity, there’s always pushback of, like, you don’t know that person! [Laughs] Like, you don’t who they really are! And of course –

Sarah: That’s kind of the point! [Laughs]

Anne Helen: Yeah, of course I don’t! Like, the only thing that we can know are the messages that are mediated for us, right? Like, even if we think that we have this direct access to a celebrity via their Instagram, like, that Instagram filter and posting and choice of photo and all of those things are doing, are, are suggesting a certain sort of image, so you can only look at the aggregate of all of those things, both what they try to say directly to you, how other people talk about them, to try to figure out what an image is at a given moment, and I think that, you know, of all of the women that I talk about in the book and, and many other women who would be included if I were to, you know, update it today, they all struggle with maybe having an understanding of themselves that is different than how they are popularly understood. So –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: – if you get, like, what you want to be, what, how you understand yourself to be, to align with that popular understanding, and I think, you know, a lot of celebrity alienation, like personal alienation, comes from seeing a disconnect. Being like, I’m trying to say I am this, I am trying to be this, and then they get misrepresented over and over again, because it’s not actually about who the person is; it’s about what need that image is fulfilling culturally. So I think some stars are obviously more adept at, like, asserting or, or wresting that narrative away. So I think Nicki Minaj is pretty good at it, and part of the way she is good at it, and I talk about this in the book, is really controlling her interviews? You know, like, if –

Sarah: Oh.

Anne Helen: – if something is, like, not going the, she, she’s not polite about, like, answering dumb questions? She wrests the interview away. She says, that’s a dumb question. She says, what are you talking about? Like, she refuses to allow the interview to be framed in a way that is not how she thinks she should be framed.

Sarah: And I’ve seen other celebrities do the same thing. I’ve seen Ariana Grande being asked, asking some radio DJ, like, is that really what you think young women think about? Really? That’s what you think we’re worried about?

Anne Helen: Right.

Sarah: No! That, like, they’ll talk back –

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: – and it used to be, I mean, I know that even when I was doing media training for interviews six or seven years ago, you know, I was coached about, you’re still a guest in their house. You can’t talk back, you can’t challenge the question, you just have to spin it the way you want to, and seeing young women be like, you know what, that question’s dumb; I’m not answering it –

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: What?!

Anne Helen: [Laughs]

Sarah: Thank you, Nicki; thank you, Ms. Minaj; I’m forever in your debt. [Laughs]

Anne Helen: Right. Well, and those moments, I think that social media rewards those moments –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: – so more and more, publicists are allowing their celebrities, their, their, the person that they are managing to do that sort of thing. So before, it, it really was, you know, even if a star wanted to do something like that, like, their publicist would either, you know, forbid it or would –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – after the fact arrange with the interviewer to have that cut, to have it edited out, because it –

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: – makes the celebrity seem rude, but now we’re like –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – oh, that’s total own! [Laughs]

Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah!

Anne: It’s, it’s pushing back against that apparatus in a way that I think people are appreciative of, because it exposes the, the, the sort of flattening effect of the celebrity-industrial complex, which is, like, always trying to make a female celebrity the sum of, like, what she wears, who she dates, her feelings about children.

Sarah: What are you wearing and, and, and what are you thinking –

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: – about these two topics, just those two?

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: One of the things that you do with your writing that I really appreciate is constantly reframing the, the way that we talk about celebrities who are women, and also reframing the way in which we understand celebrity culture and how very, very sexist and misogynist a lot of it is. Does that get frustrating, to, to see this sort of sameness in the way gossip surrounds women celebrities? It’s, it’s a, it’s like the oldest form of recycling.

Anne Helen: [Laughs] You know, but it’s funny, because each, it always, it morphs, right?

Sarah: Yes, it does evolve a little bit! [Laughs]

Anne Helen: I think of it as like a puzzle, like, how is, how is misogyny and sexism working its magic this time?

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: Right?

Sarah: Let’s find the patriarchy; where did it go?

Anne Helen: Seriously, like, because the thing about ideology is it has to erase itself. Like, it has to make itself appear just like a natural process.

Sarah: That’s very true!

Anne Helen: And so the ways in which it does that, and you know, I’m making it seem like there’s, like, you know, ideology gods or something; it’s, you know, obviously not. It’s more that any sort of idea that is present, like, it doesn’t want announce itself as an idea, as an ideology, as a, like, an argument; it wants to just – ‘cause otherwise you’d be like, whoa, this, this thing is telling me how to feel! Like, I don’t want to listen to someone lecturing me, so it has to appear, appear not like a lecture. But so the, the various ways that it camouflages itself, like, that’s fascinating! How does, how does it naturalize itself? What is the process of, like, you know, culmination now of social media and interviews and magazine covers and all of these different things that, that camouflage the way that an idea about how a woman should be, how is that working? So I, you know, it’s always fun for me, because each time that I do one of these pieces, you know, and it’s the same whether I’m doing one for BuzzFeed online or if I’m doing it for the book, like, I use the same research strategy, which is you just immerse yourself in all of the discourse, and then immediately patterns start to reveal themselves, and so when people say, like, how do you choose the quotes that you’re going to use? Like, what I do is I collect all of them, and I see the, the themes and the patterns and, like, the ways that people will try to form a narrative about a woman, and then from those themes I pick out the quotes that most exemplify that particular theme.

Sarah: So when you were doing your Ph.D. examining celebrity gossip of people who are no longer necessarily celebrities, you were working with sort of a fixed body of work. The, the narrative about those people wasn’t necessarily going to change too much, ‘cause they were either no longer stars or also dead.

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: So you had a, a, a specific, mostly set narrative about a person who was in the past.

Anne Helen: Well, if –

Sarah: Is it harder –

Anne Helen: – it’s –

Sarah: – to do that research in the present?

Anne Helen: I would say that, like, celebrity, or classic Hollywood stars is really fascinating, because the biggest ones have taken on a sort of second, second life that is so much more flat than their original stardom. So, like, Marilyn Monroe is now just, like, a poster, right?

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: Whereas –

Sarah: And I, and I know exactly which poster you mean.

Anne Helen: Yeah!

Sarah: [Laughs] It’s probably at Spencer Gifts.

Anne Helen: [Laughs] And whereas, like, her, what allowed her to become such an incredible star in the 1950s was this complex negotiation of sexuality and innocence, and then even more than that, you know, then you add on her own agency that was trying to – like, she, in her interviews and the way that she spoke and just who she was, complicates this, like, sex pot image. Like, she is just fascinating! She’s so complicated, but in order to recover that and recuperate that, you have to go back and read only things that were published at the time. Like, you can’t read, you know, a Marilyn Monroe biography from 2004, because all that –

Sarah: No.

Anne Helen: – is shaded with how we’ve come to understand her now, which is as a flat poster. But if you go back and you read, like, there’s this series of, like, three different Saturday Evening Post profiles of Marilyn Monroe which are just spectacular at teasing out these nuances. So that, to me, is always really, really fun, but it takes a lot of work because you have to do that historical research, which is not as easy as just, like, Googling, like, Marilyn Monroe interview 1954. Like, you have to buy those magazines, ‘cause they’re not available online. You have to go, you have to have, like, library access in order to get old newspaper interviews and all that sort of thing, so that, to me, I mean, it’s, it’s easier in some ways because all of those articles from nine-, there’s, there will never be another article from 1954? [Laughs]

Sarah: Right!

Anne Helen: But still, you have to try to find them all, which is much more arduous.

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: Whereas doing a star now, not only do you have the problem that I discussed at the beginning, which is that their, their star discourse continues every day, like, there’s a new articles in, in so many, but then also, with the internet, like, there’s just so much proliferating discourse about a star, so there’s, like, everything that the star themselves produces about themselves –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – so, like, interviews and, and sanctioned things, and then there’s, like, everything that anyone has ever said about them online – [laughs] – which is –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: So basically, in academia we call that, like, the reception, and so it’s very difficult to try to do all of those things at once. [Laughs]

Sarah: Plus you have the ways in which some celebrities become memes –

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: And then what the memes mean, which are separate from the narrative about the celebrity themselves?

Anne Helen: Which, but at the same time, a meme, I think, is always a very, an excellent condensation of how that celebrity has come to mean something? Right? Like –

Sarah: Yes, they’re, they’re distilled versions of that, like, one element of that person?

Anne Helen: Yes, so, like, you know, feminist Ryan Gosling, going back –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: Like, that is an incredible distillation of part of Ryan Gosling’s appeal at that time was that he was a thoughtful, hot, feminist boyfriend. [Laughs]

Sarah: Makes me also think of Jennifer Lawrence and all of the memes about her that are sarcasm.

Anne Helen: Yes. Yeah.

Sarah: So many sarcasm memes. So with the book, with the, with the paperback release, are there any chapters that were, that have stuck with you or any people that you would like to write a whole independent book about, or is that all of them?

Anne Helen: Hmm. I mean, you could, you could do a, an independent book for all of them, totally, but I think that one of the reasons I wanted to do the ten chapters is I wanted to show how unruliness isn’t, you know, it’s not just the defining characteristic of, say, Melissa McCarthy but how you could connect Melissa McCarthy to Nicki Minaj.

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: Like, how you could, how this is something that works with different vectors and in different ways but that is a uniting kind of mode of behavior in public.

Sarah: The, the appeal and the backlash against each of them has that in common.

Anne Helen: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: The chapter that I truly loved was the one about Jennifer Weiner?

Anne Helen: Oh, you know, it’s funny; I think it really depends on any, a given person’s familiarity with her work to understand what’s going on there.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Anne Helen: So people either love it or they’re like, I didn’t know, exactly know what was going on, but it –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: If you’re familiar with her or, or if they have had any sort of encounter with classed conversations, like, you know, low-middle, highbrow about literature or even just, you know, any, any sort of pop culture, then I think it’s, it’s an engaging chapter.

Sarah: That, that chapter spoke to me especially because I work exclusively inside romance fiction –

Anne Helen: Oh?

Sarah: – which is very much denigrated, and while Weiner’s books are not necessarily romances, they have a lot of romantic elements in common, and as a person who defends the way in which women’s writing is treated and defends herself against the inherent classism and sexism of the literary world –

Anne Helen: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – she also, I think, informs and inspires a lot of romance writers to follow that same path and give much, much less of a shit, because – [laughs] – if, if you’re, you know, stacking up the hierarchy, you know, Jennifer Weiner writes outstanding books about women, and yet we still don’t have a valid genre classification for them –

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: – because we can’t call them, you know, chick lit or – the, the latest one, by the way, is book club books, which is still gendered without being gendered! It makes me bananas.

Anne Helen: Right! Well, and my book is a book club book. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah! Your book was a book club book, but it wasn’t a fictional story about women doing women-y things. But, but it’s still gendered!

Anne Helen: Like, the fact that my book had this pink cover, you know, and millennial pink at that, it –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: – it, you know, I think it attracted a certain sort of reader, which was great, because, like, I want many, many, many women to read this book, but at the same time I think that men are much more self-conscious about the types of books that they will read and the types of covers that they will purchase, and I think men would be, you know, it would behoove a lot of men to read a book like – or to read, yeah, to read a book like this, and I’ve had many men who have read it, but it is a more difficult sale when something is gendered so strongly.

Sarah: Yes, even the, the title would, I think, make men go, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa! I can’t look at those words! I did make – ‘cause my husband’s and my reading tastes overlap very slightly, and I had him read the chapter on Serena Williams, and he said it completely, for him, reframed a lot of the commentary about her in a way that he sort of knew what was being said was not cool and was not, not stuff that he agreed with, but now he had language with which to be like, that is why it is suck.

Anne Helen: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that’s the thing, too, is that, like –

Sarah: Yes!

Anne Helen: – I think most men especially don’t realize all the ways in which, the subtle ways in which women are told to behave a certain way and how we internalize that?

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: And so –

Sarah: And the codes.

Anne Helen: Yeah – so when you make it visible by, like, calling attention to those patterns, then suddenly, like, it, it elucidates a lot. So that’s part of the reason why, you know, I wish that it could have a broader audience, but at the same time, you know, you have all of these, these ideas about who you would love your audience to be that intersect with, like, the, the economics of book publishing.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Anne Helen: The importance of the cover and, like, how the cover works, how the cover looks on social media. You know, there’s just, there’s so many different things, you know, just like studying a celebrity, like if you were analyzing how this book sold, you would be, you would have to analyze all those things as well.

Sarah: Absolutely. With the foreword that you wrote for the book, which was written just after the election, like I think was, you were writing about the hours after the election returns –

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: – were starting to come in. You wrote, this is how much America hates women.

Anne Helen: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Do you still think that that’s true?

Anne Helen: I mean, whoo. I think that there, so, like, when we talk about misogyny, right, like, and that’s the hatred of women, I think misogyny’s actually a good term for it, because it’s a word that isn’t, doesn’t have the word hate in it, because most people would say, like, I don’t hate women! You know, like, Trump himself says, like, no one loves women more than me, but –

Sarah: Ugh.

Anne Helen: – misogyny is a term that encompasses all of the policies and day-to-day interactions and, you know, that, it’s the big umbrella term for how our society behaves towards women, you know, and that’s everything from how do we believe women? How do we treat rape victims? How do we deal with, you know, maternity leave? All of these different things – or how, how do we conceive of beauty and a woman’s ability to, to age in public? You know, so when you add all of those things up, it might not be how we personally conceive of hate, but I do think that we do not value women in a way that we value men, and that’s not just sexism. Like, there is, there is a bit of both hatred directed towards women from men, but then also women themselves. You know, when I talk about how one of the things that we can do as, you know, in terms of unruliness in our own lives is to watch ourselves react to other women’s unruliness, to check our inclination to see someone being unruly and be like, ugh. Like, she shouldn’t be wearing that, or she shouldn’t be talking like that. Like, that’s, as much as you can believe or agree to unruliness in theory, it’s much harder to, to actually practice accepting unruliness in action.

Sarah: It’s very true. Has writing about unruly women inspired you to be more unruly? And I imagine you get that question a lot.

Anne Helen: I do, but, I mean, I think reporting is an incredibly unruly act, just in general, so, like, going up and asking someone to talk to me – [laughs] – and, and asking them to trust me and then trying to, you know, pin together their thoughts. Like, I am over and over again asserting myself in the public sphere, and it is terrifying, and that, like, if you, you would have asked my mom what her, like, deathly shy five-year-old would be doing with her life, it wouldn’t be this.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: And you know, and I’m an introvert, and –

Sarah: Ditto.

Anne Helen: – so to do it, for me, every day it feels like crossing a boundary when I’m doing it, which is part of why I find it super exhausting, and at the end of a reporting day I just, like, stare at the wall and eat a Hot Pocket.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: But, so, I, you know, I think that writing about it has coincided with me doing a bunch more reporting, and so that is something that I think about a lot, is that intersection.

Sarah: That is very cool. My job – ‘cause my website is my job – my job is to examine romance fiction, which most people outside of the genre will dismiss as not very important, and I know that when you were, when I read a lot of your early work was on the, I think where I found you was The Hairpin.

Anne Helen: Hmm, yeah.

Sarah: Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, it was The Hairpin. There was this sense of, wait, you got your Ph.D. in what now?

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: Do, do you still get that? The, wait, you, you study who and what now?

Anne Helen: [Laughs] I mean, I, I get it less because people, I’ve, I’ve distanced myself from that moment.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: But, you know, most of the time people are like, that’s so cool, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: And that depends, though, on your attitude towards the humanities.

Sarah: Very true.

Anne Helen: So, like, if you think that studying the humanities and studying cultural studies is worthwhile, then you’re like, yeah, that’s awesome! Like, yes, let’s understand celebrity more! And then sometimes, you know, if you think that celebrity is bullshit, then of course you think that studying it is bullshit. And I think, or if you think it’s frivolous, right. But I think a lot of times, you know, the, the way that people have arrived at my work – and, and you know, probably, I would guess, your work as well – is that, like, I take the pleasures that we take in celebrity seriously. Like, I think if this is –

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: – something that we are spending time with and that gives us pleasure, then why not think about that?

Sarah: Yes, exactly.

Anne Helen: And also come up with language to talk about it? And so I think that any, like, you know, people say it’s like highbrow discussion of lowbrow stuff, but I think that’s a silly distinction. I think it’s thinking more about things that sometimes while we’re actually consuming it we’re not thinking – like, I love being enveloped in a movie or in a celebrity narrative, but then I also love that secondary active thinking more about it.

Sarah: Yes. Yeah, that’s pretty much what I do when I read romance fiction. I love the, I love the story of courtship, and I love the emotional journey, and I love the way in which women are writing stories about courtship for a majority audience of women, but I also love looking at the structure of what is happening in the story and how is misogyny baked into it, or how is racism showing up, or how is really old and completely antiquated ideas about sex showing up? So the, looking at the structure while you’re immersing yourself in it is really fun!

Anne Helen: Yeah!

Sarah: I completely understand! [Laughs]

Anne Helen: Really! Yeah! I love that analysis. People are like, oh, doesn’t it ruin everything?

Sarah: No!

[Laughter]

Anne Helen: No, not at all! It makes it richer!

Sarah: Now, I know that your work has taken you way, way, way west, and you’re doing investigative reporting for BuzzFeed News now. What are, what are you working on? And that’s really cool, by the way.

Anne Helen: Yeah! I mean, I live in Montana, which I grew up in Idaho, so it’s not that weird. [Laughs] And like, I, to me it’s, it’s home. Like, it’s, it’s dealing with people that I, that I know and that I grew up with and a kind of way of being in the world that is very familiar to me, and then, you know, my reporting goes, it’s everything from, like, political journalism to kind of following the money to, you know, going to a trump rally that’s around here, and I just kind of get to follow things that I find interesting and try to elucidate things about the West that people who aren’t from here might not even know anything about, you know.

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: Yeah! I really love it. And then I also get to do my celebrity stuff on the side, so. Like, you know, I’ll do, like, you know, it’s kind of my reprieve. Like, I’ll do a bunch of reporting, and then I’ll be like, oh, now I’ll write about Gwen Stefani, that sort of thing.

Sarah: And yet there’s a significant overlap in a lot of the themes that you write about too.

Anne Helen: It’s true; I mean, that’s because culture is culture, you know. Like, I call myself a culture reporter, which means, culture can mean anything from celebrity to, you know, what’s going on with a political race.

Sarah: Yeah, and, and how the political discussion of women and the celebrity discussion of women have a lot of overlap.

Anne Helen: Yes! Absolutely! I mean, they’re not, it’s not like there’s two separate spheres of discourse. Like, the same themes –

Sarah: No.

Anne Helen: – really bleed into, like, across these, the whole world of discourse. You know, the internet, I think, is such a great metaphor for that. Like, do, you know, just because you’re on a separate web page doesn’t mean – you’re still in the browser, right. Like, this –

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: – the same, the same themes pervade all of it.

Sarah: It, it very much is, and the ways in which we are served and fed information about celebrities is just as finely calibrated as our political news feed as well. Even though, even, even in ways we’re not even paying attention to.

Anne Helen: Yes.

Sarah: Like, I looked at one article about the wedding between Harry and Meghan Markle, and, like, my Google news feed is like, here’s every royal that has ever been royaled ever. Enjoy! Like, whoa!

Anne Helen: [Laughs] Yes, absolutely.

Sarah: So one of the things I read this week was your TinyLetter about the profile of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop –

Anne Helen: Yeah!

Sarah: – and how you identified the idea that women are always being informed what we lack, specifically a penis and a phallus to measure the penis against –

Anne Helen: [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: – but what, also what product is going to make us better, but not entirely, ‘cause you can’t fully fill the lack; it always has to be there so the next thing can be sold to you.

Anne Helen: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: And it occurred to me how much the gossip and celebrity narrative works that angle as well.

Anne Helen: Oh, totally. Yeah, like, you can’t, I mean, gossip, like a classic melodrama, right, like – so a classic soap opera is meant to continue forever. Like, you know Guiding Light was, like, started in 1930s and went until, like, 1990s or two, like, very recently, so you have to be able to string it along forever and ever and ever, and so in order to do that, you always have to have a missing piece: what is going to happen next? And so that is –

Sarah: Right.

Anne Helen: – absolutely the way that celebrity gossip works. Like, even a tell-all, “tell-all” in quotes –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Anne Helen: – profile, you know, there is information that is shielded, but, there, there are, is, you know, you get just enough so that you’re hungry for more, and that, you know, that, if you think about celebrity images as narratives that are continually growing, that another chapter is being added, I think it’s much easier to understand both how they’re built and how they’re received and how they’re sustained, which is, you’ve got to, like, have that cliffhanger for the next chapter.

Sarah: And the, and the next product is going to add a little bit more but not fully fulfill the story.

Anne Helen: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah: And the next profile is going to do that as well.

Anne Helen: Definitely.

Sarah: What fascinates me is that the, there’s a number of people that make this happen? Like, there’s a, the, the product and the marketing around the product and the alleged problem that this product is going to solve, and then the marketing about the product that places it into a magazine, which creates another narrative, and how that same process is, is in place for celebrities. There’s this person who has a thing that they’re going to promote, but the narrative about them is not necessarily about the thing; it’s going to be about something ancillary, and there’s, like, a whole team of people that are involved in doing it. Do you ever look at something and be like, I could so do that better?

Anne Helen: [Laughs] You know, people, sometimes they’re like, oh, do, do you get, like, pitched by publicists all the time who want to hire you? And I think that I’m, like, much too cerebral for that. Like, I would be like, no, we should do this! Like, they should – you know, my messaging is, is a little more, is maybe too nuanced. And I think, you know, people who are publicists, like, they are very effective at what they’re doing. They’re skilled in a lot of this messaging that I think I’m maybe would be too cynical, being, like, manufacturing it myself, you know.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, I’m on the receiving end of a lot of publicity, specifically for books, and romance publishing is a very small world, so I work with the same publicists relentlessly all the time, and sometimes they get up and switch houses and I have to remember who they work for –

Anne Helen: Yeah –

Sarah: – but it’s always the same core people, and they’re, you know, like with any industry, there’s a language that develops around it, but they have to come up with a reason and a selling point for each book, even though the core narrative of that book is very similar to all the other books, because they’re all courtship narratives; you just have to identify the hook and the trope and who’s going to like it. And I could never, ever do that. I would be so bad at it. [Laughs]

Anne Helen: But you can still see how it works. Like –

Sarah: Yes! I see the structure! Can’t build it.

Anne Helen: Yeah, exactly. So, like, you know, I don’t think that their jobs are dumb in any way. Like –

Sarah: No! Not at all.

Anne Helen: – they’re very effective at their jobs, and they’re very necessary. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to try to break down how they do it.

[Laughter]

Anne Helen: So.

Sarah: So what are you working on now, celebrity-wise and political, politics-wise?

Anne Helen: I, politics-wise I’m really ramping up because we, you know, it’s, we’re leading up into the midterms, so I have a bunch of different politics pieces that I’m working on and will be working on until the midterms. Celebrity-wise, like, I’m kind of interested right now in – this is going to seem random, but I’m, I listen to a lot of country music, especially when I’m driving out here, and women have disappeared almost entirely from country music, which is fascinating to me.

Sarah: I’ve notice that too! I moved from New Jersey to Maryland, and the number of radio stations in Maryland that have country and also Jesus are, are, like, way, way bigger than the number in Jersey.

Anne Helen: Yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: Like, so many more, but I don’t hear any women!

Anne Helen: But, and so, like, and Carrie Underwood actually has an album coming out, so, like, I’m curious to maybe do something on her. A lot of times I, I don’t know who I’m going to – like, celebrity is much more I get inspired by something or, like, I see something happen, and I’m like, oh, I want to write about that, so there’s, there’s far less kind of forecasting.

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: In general, I’m really fascinated by whiteness and the way that whiteness is flailing. [Laughs] You know, with just how –

Sarah: [Laughs] Whiteness is flailing is the best phrase!

Anne Helen: – as white supremacy continues to be undermined, as it should be, right –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: – but just the ways in which it tries to reassert itself, sometimes very cleverly and effectively, and sometimes very awkwardly and –

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: – stupidly. [Laughs] I think, like, so I wrote an article earlier this year about Justin Timberlake’s “Montana” album, which is, you know, a huge flop, but, like, how in a lot of ways that was him trying to, like, return to and, and expand his, his white masculinity, and –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: – that grew in a really fascinating way, so, like, that, to me, you know, people are, when I first encountered, like, the idea of thinking of whiteness as a race, which again, ideology erases itself, so whiteness erases itself because it wants to erase its supremacy – I first encountered those ideas in grad school, and they were incredibly, they were incredibly persuasive to me. Like, they, they really changed the way that I thought of myself and of critical race studies, ‘cause usually, I think, in undergrad or just in life, like, race is something that everyone else is that’s not white. It is not an identity that –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: – white people have. They don’t think of themselves as raced people. Like, even the, the phrase nonwhite, right, assumes that white is just an entity and everything else is not-white. [Laughs]

Sarah: Right, white is a natural “default.”

Anne Helen: White is without color, right?

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: So I think it, but it’s only been recently that whiteness as, like, you know, like white privilege, even that phrase has become something that more people outside of academia are realizing and interrogating, and it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people. Like, it is, understanding yourself as, you know, understanding your own privilege and also, like, understanding the ways in which your, like, whiteness has, wields different powers in all these different scenarios, it feels bad for white people, and so there’s a lot of discomfort around it, and looking at that, I think, whether it’s in how it manifests in celebrity or in politics or in everyday interactions or in books or in, you know, all sorts of different discourse like that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – that’s probably going to be the core of my next book, but working towards there.

Sarah: Very cool. The thing about the Timberlake article – and I’m trying very hard not to, like, just make this an interview of that was so great, that thing that you did! –

Anne Helen: [Laughs]

Sarah: – but the thing that you did was so great, because I could not articulate what it was about that album that just made me go, ugh, no. [Laughs]

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: Seeing it as an attempt to codify a white image for himself –

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: – in a way that, oh! That’s, that is exactly why I find all of this so unappealing!

Anne Helen: Right.

Sarah: It is, it is finding that language that is such a crucial skill!

Anne Helen: Right, right, totally.

Sarah: Have you looked at Kacey Musgraves, if you’re looking at country stars?

Anne Helen: So she, I mean, this is the thing if, for, she’s, like, a, she’s an indie star whose music some people call country. Like, I love her.

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: I love her, but she’s not played on a single country station.

Sarah: That’s what I’ve noticed! It’s fascinating to me! And yet everything about her image is codified as I’m a country person.

Anne Helen: But, like, a certain sort of country person.

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: She is like a city country person, which –

Sarah: Yes.

Anne Helen: She’s like a person who grew up on a farm who then moved to the city, which is very different than, you know, a lot of country stars. There are people who grew up in the city who now pretend like they live on a farm. And I –

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes!

Anne Helen: I mean, I could, like, I have thought so much about country music, and there’s, there’s a big piece waiting inside of me – [laughs] – that will come out some day, but I, yeah, I think, like, even the ways that someone like Kacey Musgraves or other alt-country bands, so, like, someone like, I don’t, Jason Isbell, if you’ve heard his music, like, the way that they try to wield the country sounds in a more, like in a way that, that liberal city dwellers like is –

Sarah: Yep.

Anne Helen: – really interesting. And again, I’m not saying – like, I love them. They are some of my favorite artists, but what is that turn that makes Kacey Musgraves more, like, more palatable? And part of it is, is her lyricism; part of it is her sound; part of it is, like, appearing on the cover of magazines like Fader, which –

Sarah: Yeah.

Anne Helen: – you know, is, like, a hipster magazine, but, like, what is that slight turn that differentiates her from Carrie Underwood? And part of it is just populism, but I think that, like, examining that more closely is worth it.

Sarah: Yeah. My last question is always what are you reading that you’d like to tell people about?

Anne Helen: Oh, so many things! [Laughs] I, I just read Educated by Tara Westover?

Sarah: Ooh!

Anne Helen: Do you know that? Have you heard of this book?

Sarah: Yes! Tell me what you thought!

Anne Helen: I loved it. I mean, not only ‘cause I’m from Idaho and because I’ve been doing a lot of reading about more kind of fundamentalist Mormons, which she is in the book, but – so the book is about a woman who grows up totally off the grid in rural southern Idaho and doesn’t go to school; like, her dad doesn’t believe in any sort of government control, whether that’s going to school or wearing seat belts, and so it’s the story of how she eventually finds her way to a Ph.D. program in Cambridge, but, like, how difficult it is, how essential education and socialization is to, like, our, the way that we live in the world. And she’s an incredible writer. It hits the sweet spot at the, you know, it sold a, so many copies, and I think it’s because it’s the sort of book that, like, was the New York Times pick of the month for May, but then also –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Anne Helen: – was, like, a People magazine pick? So it’s that incredible intersection of, like, really deftly and persuasively written but also, like, gripping. ‘Cause, like, they don’t go to doctors. Like, so what do you do when your entire family, like, gets in rollover? Like, how do you treat people? How does she finally get into BYU? What does she do when she realized she’s never heard the word holocaust before? So all of those things. I found it incredible, and it’s a sort of, again, kind of like my book, it’s, like, good for you – [laughs] – in that it’s edifying. I mean every book is edifying, but, like, it, it’s that, that incredible intersection between informative but then also gripping.

Sarah: Yes. This book comes with two frames: what is happening and what you think about what is happening.

Anne Helen: Yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: They’re going to be happening at the same time.

Anne Helen: Yeah.

Sarah: Thank you so, so, so much for doing this interview. I have so enjoyed talking to you. I really appreciate your time.

Anne Helen: I can’t, this has been a wonderful conversation, and I cannot wait to, you know, if anyone hears it and wants to talk more, I’d love to.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this interview. I want to thank Anne Helen Petersen for hanging out with me and also putting up with the fact that a very large portion of myself was on Team No Chill. Like I said, I’m a very big fan of her writing, and it was an honor to do this interview. I hope you enjoyed it as well. I will have links to a lot of her writing, some of the pieces that we mention, and her TinyLetter, should you wish to sign up. It’s really interesting, and I highly recommend it.

This episode is brought to you by More or Less a Countess by Anna Bradley. The Somerset sisters, three beautiful, headstrong debutantes in Regency London, are discovering that a bit of scandal is a delightful thing. Violet Somerset was always the bookworm, but when a notorious rake seems intent on pursuing her younger sister, Violet does what any good older sister would do: pretend to be her sister herself to fend him off. This comedy of mistaken identities from author Anna Bradley is a delightful mix of Regency atmosphere, bold characters, and wit. More or Less a Countess by Anna Bradley is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

Every episode gets a transcript, and this week’s transcript is brought to you by International Guy: Paris by Audrey Carlan, the number one New York Times bestselling author of the Calendar Girl series. Parker Ellis, CEO of International Guy Inc., advises the wealthiest people in the world on life and love. For the right price, he can make anything possible. So when a Parisian perfume heiress calls him, Parker is more than happy to oblige. Unexpectedly left a perfume empire, Sophie isn’t ready to be a CEO. That’s where Parker steps in. Just a few days with him, and Sophie will be more than ready to take her family company – and Paris – by storm. But Paris is just the beginning. There is a whole world waiting for Parker, and the woman of Parker’s dreams is out there somewhere. He’ll find her one day. Dive into International Guy: Paris, the first in Audrey Carlan’s sizzling new twelve-novella International Guy series. Also available now: International Guy: New York, Copenhagen, and Milan. The International Guy series by Audrey Carlan is published by Montlake Romance and is available now wherever books are sold.

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As always, I will end the episode with a terrible joke, and this is a terrible joke. It’s horrible. It’s so bad, I love it.

What does a thesaurus eat for breakfast?

What does a thesaurus eat for breakfast?

A synonym roll.

[Laughs] It’s so bad, I love it! Synonym rolls! Okay. [Clears throat] Yes, now that I’ve brought myself back into professional areas of behavior – [laughs] – not likely – on behalf of everyone here, I want to wish you the very, very best of reading. Have a great weekend, and we will see you back here next week.

[bouncy music]