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

by Anne Helen Petersen

The rigor, complexity, and alienation that attend the avant-garde ensure that only a certain sort of person, with a certain set of class privileges, will like it—which effectively reinforces its exclusivity and importance. This understanding of mass versus high culture also pivots on the experience of consumption: it doesn’t matter what the actual content is so much as the attitude, and reaction, one has to it. You approach a movie like National Treasure or a novel like The Da Vinci Code with the understanding that you’ll “get it”—its humor, its pathos, its purpose—and everyone else will “get it” in a similar manner. Going to a Mahler symphony or watching an experimental film, by contrast, requires a posture of possibility. You must strive to understand; your understanding may not match anyone else’s.