Anne Helen Petersen > Quotes

“She should be assertive but not bossy, feminine but not prissy, experienced but not condescending, fashionable but not superficial, forceful but not shrill. Put simply: she should be masculine, but not too masculine; feminine, but not too feminine. She should be everything, which means she should be nothing. That”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon—and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“[Burnout] isn’t a personal problem. It’s a societal one—and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“It’s one thing to be young, cherub-faced, straight woman doing and saying things that make people uncomfortable. It’s quite another – and far riskier – to do those same things in a body that is not white, straight, not slender, not young, or not American.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“Millennials became the first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes. With assistance from our parents, society, and educators, we came to understand ourselves, consciously or not, as “human capital”: subjects to be optimized for better performance in the economy.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“Sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting”—a”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“One common refrain I’ve heard from Gifted and Talented kids is how none of us really learned how to think,” he said. “We could just retain information so much easier, and most importantly, we had great reading comprehension, which is 90 percent of school assignments. Once I got to college, I realized how little I really know about studying and effectively learning and thinking rather than just reading and knowing.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“We were raised to believe that if we worked hard enough, we could win the system - of American capitalism and meritocracy - or at least live comfortably within it. But something happened in the late 2010s. We looked up from our work and realized, there’s no winning the system when the system itself is broken.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“Which is precisely why I wanted to write this book: these unruly women are so magnetic, but that magnetism is countered, at every point, by ideologies that train both men and women to distance themselves from those behaviors in our own lives. Put differently, it’s one thing to admire such abrasiveness and disrespect for the status quo in someone else; it’s quite another to take that risk in one’s own life.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“Most of us would rather read a book than stare at our phones, but we’re so tired that mindless scrolling is all we have energy to do.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“To turn black women into objectified others was to underline their difference; they may be beautiful, but they are of another kind, separate from the dominant understanding of attractiveness.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“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

“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

“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

“It took burning out for many of us to arrive at this point. But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“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

“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

“A reckoning with burnout is so often the reckoning with the fact that the things you fill your day with — the things you fill your life with — feel unrecognizable from the sort of life you want to live, and the sort of meaning you want to make of it. That’s why the burnout condition is more than just addiction to work. It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you? Is there a self left to excavate? Do you know what you like and don’t like when there’s no one there to watch, and no exhaustion to force you to choose the path of least resistance? Do you know how to move without always moving forward?”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

“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

“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

“[T]hat’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

“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

“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 – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“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

“Historically, it has taken very little to turn women against one another and even less to turn men, so anxious about the maintenance of power, against women who attempt to seize some modicum of it for themselves.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

“...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

“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 – A Cultural Critique of Capitalism, Debt, Hustle Culture, and Exhaustion

“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