Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

by Anne Helen Petersen

Women make up around 80 percent of the fiction-buying public, making them an incredibly powerful market force.4 They’re just not buying the right books—at least according to a pervasive and problematic cultural assumption. The right books are “difficult”: experimental, impenetrable, male. They get written up in prestigious book reviews; they win awards that place a tasteful gold stamp in their corner. Their authors don’t blog or tweet about them, because they don’t blog or tweet. They take decades to write. They’re released in hardcover, the robust carapace of high literature. They occupy the rarefied air of high art. And the majority, but certainly not all, of the authors of these books are men.

Yep