outsmartyourshelf's review against another edition
emotional
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
2.0
A book to help "fat chicks" navigate a thin-centric world, everything from shopping to health, from choosing an airplane seat, to the best sex positions for the fuller figured. The 2 star rating is not because it's a particularly badly written book, the issue is that it only skims the surface of the problems with how society views & treats fat people & I've read several in-depth books on the subject so this seemed quite superficial. I also found some of the 'witty retorts' to fat shaming comments were almost as bad but aimed at thin people. Surely we should be aiming to not body shame anyone?
It left me feeling rather dissatisfied, but it doesn't purport to be an academic work, however, & it's probably best as a quick introduction to the subject of fat acceptance. Plus it was written in 2005, 17 years ago, & so much of it is now out-of-date, many of the links no longer work, or shops or magazines featured are no longer around.
So what has changed in the last 17 years? I've noticed that there are a lot more books which feature plus-sized main characters, but it seems that very little else has changed, & there's still precious little representation on mainstream TV & film. In fact we seem to have regressed lately to making the expected standard of female beauty even narrower - I saw an article about the cast of a particular reality TV show over the last few years, & apart from changing their hair & eye colour, all the women looked practically identical. I don't blame the women for this, I blame society for its weird obsession with wanting to airbrush any natural beauty or signs of ageing out of existence. It seems representation & diversity is very much only a surface thing where society's actions don't necessarily mirror its words & that needs to change.
It left me feeling rather dissatisfied, but it doesn't purport to be an academic work, however, & it's probably best as a quick introduction to the subject of fat acceptance. Plus it was written in 2005, 17 years ago, & so much of it is now out-of-date, many of the links no longer work, or shops or magazines featured are no longer around.
So what has changed in the last 17 years? I've noticed that there are a lot more books which feature plus-sized main characters, but it seems that very little else has changed, & there's still precious little representation on mainstream TV & film. In fact we seem to have regressed lately to making the expected standard of female beauty even narrower - I saw an article about the cast of a particular reality TV show over the last few years, & apart from changing their hair & eye colour, all the women looked practically identical. I don't blame the women for this, I blame society for its weird obsession with wanting to airbrush any natural beauty or signs of ageing out of existence. It seems representation & diversity is very much only a surface thing where society's actions don't necessarily mirror its words & that needs to change.
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