eating disorders

Skinny Bitching

Debbie Rasmussen — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:17:57 -0500

Last week I was on a radio program to discuss Skinny Bitch, the vegan/animal rights manifesto wrapped in chick-lit veneer that became a bestseller after Posh Spice was photographed holding it.

Big Trouble

Colin Sagan — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 18:25:56 -0500

BeckyAll names have been changed. has been active in the fat acceptance movement for a good half-dozen years. She attends and organizes awareness-raising events, takes part in her local fat social scene, and fights to end discrimination against fat people with a powerful combination of weary sadness and righteous anger. She wears her weight like well-adorned armor, betraying no sense of regret or shame in her 480-pound body.

Becky also has an eating disorder.

Weighing Reality

Kyla — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 02:00:00 -0500

“Obesity,” declares Charlotte Cooper, author of 1998’s Fat and Proud: The Politics of Size, “is just a word used by people to medicalize fat.” Extra weight, once considered a genetic short straw, is increasingly characterized as a crisis threatening the physical, political, and moral health of our nation—even as large bodies are becoming increasingly visible in popular culture.

Bodies of Work

Colin Sagan — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 03:00:00 -0400

“Analysis is hard, it’s complicated, and it disturbs the comfortable simplicity of familiar worldviews.” So writes Susan Bordo, professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky. And she should know: Her incisive writings on a wide variety of topics cut through thickets of controversy and rhetoric to produce a fine, elegant, and, above all, resonant analysis. On the intersection of psychology and culture at the nexus of the eating-disorder epidemic: “Families exist in cultural time and space.

Mad As A Wet Hen #2

Kyla — Fri, 01 Mar 1996 00:00:00 -0500

“So now you can eat like one of the boys, but still look like one of the girls,” says the male voice-over touting Baked Lays potato chips while supermodels stuff their faces on screen. Eating is a masculine activity, while being looked at is feminine. But this old-hat belief is topped by the variation on Lays’s usual tag line: “Bet you can’t eat just one...bag.” The all-too-common binge/purge cycle of eating disorders is obliquely referenced, and even condoned. Yes, go ahead, says the ad, eat bags and bags and bags, and still stay thin. We’ll look the other way while you vomit.

Unbearable Weight

Kyla — Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500

Have you found that all the books you read on eating disorders and body image advance theories that don’t mesh with your own experience? Do the authors of said books make statements that make you feel like they live in an alternate universe?