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For the monthly politics book club we picked Aubrey Gordon’s “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. Gordon is perhaps best known as the cohost of the podcast Maintenance Phase, which I have never listened to because I am very bad at listening to podcasts, but which many people have said is reliably excellent.
As you can probably tell by the title, this is a primer-type book in mythbusting format, a type of publication that has garnered a certain amount of debate, which Gordon acknowledges. However, they can be very handy for pulling together a lot of rebuttals to common talking points in one place, and this book does that admirably. Another common criticism (and one I have made myself on other subjects) about mythbusting primers is that they’re dead boring if you’re already more than moderately familiar with the subject matter; this is probably true here too but I am under-read on the subject so it was great for me.
I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with some of the material covered here because as someone who is fairly heavily involved in social justice spaces generally and also is a gym rat and therefore spends time specifically in spaces where people are trying to do working out in a less dreadful way than the mainstream (hi, She’s a Beast!), I’ve certainly run across a good amount of discussion and material about it online. However, it’s been a while since I’ve read a whole book on the subject, and the last one had a very specific focus on anti-blackness and beauty standards (this is not a complaint; it was a fascinating read) whereas this one has a bit of a broader scope.
And it definitely reminded me why it’s worth sitting down and reading A Whole Real Book about a topic every now and again, even the sort of book that’s structured to put things into bite-size pieces that sort of mimic reading articles online. A lot of things become clearer when you set them out in an orderly fashion, who knew? Anyway, the stuff here that’s the most interesting to me is the science history stuff, tracking down the origins and spread of popular junk science factoids like “calories in, calories out!” (from a now-debunked paper from 1958. Yes, 1958). I also personally enjoyed the rant about how “X is the last socially acceptable prejudice” is a very stupid and wrong thing to say, not just about anti-fatness but also about the many many other things people say it about, which is what allows it to be a stock phrase, and the simple fact that it is a stock phrase you’d think would be a tipoff that it’s wrong, but people keep using it anyway.
I suspect this will be a very lively book discussion since the subject matter is absolutely infuriating. Gordon’s writing is accessible and often funny but the stuff she’s talking about is grim.
As you can probably tell by the title, this is a primer-type book in mythbusting format, a type of publication that has garnered a certain amount of debate, which Gordon acknowledges. However, they can be very handy for pulling together a lot of rebuttals to common talking points in one place, and this book does that admirably. Another common criticism (and one I have made myself on other subjects) about mythbusting primers is that they’re dead boring if you’re already more than moderately familiar with the subject matter; this is probably true here too but I am under-read on the subject so it was great for me.
I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with some of the material covered here because as someone who is fairly heavily involved in social justice spaces generally and also is a gym rat and therefore spends time specifically in spaces where people are trying to do working out in a less dreadful way than the mainstream (hi, She’s a Beast!), I’ve certainly run across a good amount of discussion and material about it online. However, it’s been a while since I’ve read a whole book on the subject, and the last one had a very specific focus on anti-blackness and beauty standards (this is not a complaint; it was a fascinating read) whereas this one has a bit of a broader scope.
And it definitely reminded me why it’s worth sitting down and reading A Whole Real Book about a topic every now and again, even the sort of book that’s structured to put things into bite-size pieces that sort of mimic reading articles online. A lot of things become clearer when you set them out in an orderly fashion, who knew? Anyway, the stuff here that’s the most interesting to me is the science history stuff, tracking down the origins and spread of popular junk science factoids like “calories in, calories out!” (from a now-debunked paper from 1958. Yes, 1958). I also personally enjoyed the rant about how “X is the last socially acceptable prejudice” is a very stupid and wrong thing to say, not just about anti-fatness but also about the many many other things people say it about, which is what allows it to be a stock phrase, and the simple fact that it is a stock phrase you’d think would be a tipoff that it’s wrong, but people keep using it anyway.
I suspect this will be a very lively book discussion since the subject matter is absolutely infuriating. Gordon’s writing is accessible and often funny but the stuff she’s talking about is grim.