Thursday, August 22, 2013

Big Brother (by Lionel Shriver) is watching your weight

My primal scream reply to Lionel Shriver's use of the word "fat." She attacks fat activists by suggesting that fat phobia is a natural and unavoidable cultural idea. She's promoting her novel, Big Brother, in NY Mag and I'm ardently disagreeing on Body Impolitic. The headline was an inspired addition by Debbie Notkin who edited my post with her usual elegance (thanks!) I like that title way better than my original idea: "A Convex author replies to a (presumably) concave author"--though I remain outraged that Shriver talks about "the convex" as a euphemism for "fat people".

Sunday, August 4, 2013

A letter I didn't know I needed to read

Sometimes you run across a statement that makes you take a deep breath and feel like you found something you needed to hear, even though you didn’t know you needed to hear it. That’s the way I feel about Iris Higgins’ “An Open Apology to All of My Weight Loss Clients” posted in her blog on 07/27/2013

Higgins comes from a different perspective than I do. She’s “New-Agey” enough to invite readers to call her “your fairy angel.” She now works helping clients build self-esteem and empowerment without dieting, but for 3 years she worked at Jenny Craig. The rest of my post is at Body Impolitic