dragon_s_hoard's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.0


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entiresunset's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

A must read for everyone. Cannot recommend this enough. I learned so much by reading this book and am now able to tackle my own internalised anti-fat bias and weight stigma and to start my own healing process.

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stevia333k's review against another edition

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informative inspiring tense

4.5

This is a good book when I'm trying to get a different angle on conversion torture because this book is geared for the intersection of fat activism & feminism. i recommend this book. basically, screw the myth of willpower. i would say the book is scary with its descriptions of street harassment & assault, but there's a sort of horror of oppression that's alluded to but not explicitly gotten to, even though there is a lot of connections talked about throughout the book. that being said i'm adding these next 2 paragraphs in order to help synthesize what i got from this book with other information i've seen, especially since i haven't read like academic journals about fat rights, fat liberation, fat studies, etc. while i have marked it with spoiler formatting, please note that i have added information that are from other sources.

SpoilerThat being said, I feel like the book has a lot of emphasis on hatred against fat people, when i noticed that a lot of the bullying i faced in school was connected to people trying to assimilate & suck up to the teachers. it's the trying to get closer to enclosured power as opposed to breaking that privatization & getting it distributed equitably.

like there's 2 things i think of at least: the military wanting a one-size-fits-all outfit to make gear standardized (they ended up having to make 3 sizes), and how fatness is used to play into desireability politics to cover up how white patriarchs raped black perceived-females. like, i sense those were meant to be simmering in the background, (we literally started out with how fatphobia is connected to militarism, and how fatphobia is compared to an "epidemic" like how bourgeois depictions of famine refugees as zombies & "great replacement" canard works with settler colonizers. but again, these are left lower-key.)

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sodanisays's review against another edition

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challenging informative slow-paced

4.0


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whittenholmes's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted reflective sad medium-paced

5.0


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redefiningrachel's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

5.0


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tmchopra's review against another edition

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challenging informative fast-paced

5.0


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annieu's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

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karcitis's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful informative sad medium-paced

4.75


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jcstokes95's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

 A book like this does not exist yet, and I think in 50 years, when we have finally begun to truly confront the reality of anti-fat bias, this will be the classic we look to. When I heard the anonymous, radical writer of Your Fat Friend on Medium had revealed her identity and published a book, I pre-ordered it immediately. I salivated waiting for it to arrive, and when I got it, I kept it on my shelf for two years. Because I realized it would be one of the most triggering reading experiences of my life (correct). This book though, it’s so necessary and so radical, I just want to tell everyone to read it. But I’m nervous to even review it for all the reasons it says I will be.

Gordon’s experiences throughout this book constantly reflected my own life experiences. This was nauseating because it meant remember all the screaming out of cars at me, all my anxious feelings toward dating, experiences that led me there, all the coworker questions about food, every garbage medical experience and denial of care. I had to think about all the ways I have learned to protect myself because Gordon’s own stories were reflecting that back to me. Then I thought, there is no way any thin person it going to ever get any understanding of these stories, because fat people are too afraid to tell them. We are disbelieved on any claim we make. Gordon gets to the heart of this issue as well.

Honestly, she’s slamming fact after fact down about how the abuse, intolerance and injustice serves to worsen fat people’s health outcomes. She’s telling you what any person on the tough side of the fucked BMI scale will tell you. There is very little about your body’s composition that you can control. If we could control it, wouldn’t we change it to avoid the harassment? Or do we really believe that over 30 percent of Americans are really into being negged by strangers?

The message here is inherent dignity. Every person, no matter their health, weight, attractiveness, ability level has inherent dignity. This is what we all need to hear. Gordon’s digging into what I have always found most fascinating about discriminators toward any group. The way the illusion of choice emboldens people to believe they have a say in other’s life and rights. (Choice was the core argument against gay marriage and continues to be the main argument against trans rights). It has always been bullshit.

I could pretty much talk about all my thoughts on this book for days. But I won’t. Because honestly, one of aforementioned self-protection practices I’ve learned is not sharing my every thought on fatness on the internet. So, where I will end it, every person should try to read this book. It is going to make you uncomfortable; you will be squirming in your chair the whole time. But maybe you will be able to begin confronting the ways you make life difficult for others without even knowing it. 

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