#and an adult film actress is hardly phyllis schafley

Webcam Model(LarissaGaby01) is live
LIVE

Little Book Review: Dietland

Author: Sarai Walker.

Publication Date: 2015.

Genre: General fiction.

Premise: Plum Kettle, ghostwriter for a teen magazine in NYC, is just waiting to have weight-loss surgery so her “real life” can begin. In the meantime, she’s meek and practically reclusive. Then a strange young woman points her to a group of unconventional women who encourage her to live her life a different way. At the same time, a shadowy organization, identified only as “Jennifer,” starts violently striking back at sexism in society.

Thoughts: When this novel is focused on Plum’s struggles as an unusually large woman in a fatphobic society and her journey to self-acceptance, it’s on pretty solid ground. Plum does little for her current self; her days consist of working a job she dislikes, eating tasteless food, secluding herself in her apartment, and ordering clothes for her future “thin self.” It’s exciting to follow her as she comes to accept that she deserves nice clothes, good food, recognition from others, and dreams now, no matter what size she is. Unfortunately, the novel has grander ambitions that it can’t fulfill. Its attempts to address sexism as a whole often come across as juvenile at best, and horribly offensive at worst.

Take, for example, Plum’s shifting attitude towards the advice column she ghostwrites for. At the beginning of the story, she’s offering empathetic, practical advice to a teen girl with an abusive home life. Towards the end, she answers another letter, from an eighteen-year-old woman who has graduated from college and is trying to decide between using her savings to go to Italy to study art or using them to pay for breast implants. Plum answers with a Sliding Doors-style reverie about what would happen in each scenario. If this young woman decides to study art in Italy, she’ll have many interesting experiences and grow as a person. If she gets breast implants, she’ll become a vapid party girl who eventually settles for a brief dental hygienist career, followed by an unfulfilling marriage to an old, unattractive, and eventually unfaithful dentist. I mean…I agree that it’s sad and infuriating that so many women feel pressured to change their appearances to the point of seeking painful, even potentially fatal surgery! I’m just not sure that “getting breast implants will automatically turn you into a bimbo and drain all meaning from your life” is actually a feminist message. I’ve read eerily similar passages from the POVs of fictional “nice guys” who are upset that their high school crush went to the prom with the quarterback instead of them. Whatever, someday Bryan will be a super-rich computer scientist with several model girlfriends and Ashley will be a dumpy mom driving her four kids around in a minivan while Jake (balding) works at his dad’s car dealership. Wait…is “Sk8r Boi” feminist?

And it gets worse! The organization known as “Jennifer” targets various men–rapists, porn moguls, etc.–but it also straight-up murders women. The most prominent victims are a porn actress (grotesquely portrayed as a CSA survivor who’s had so much on-camera sex that she had to get her vagina replaced) and the girlfriend of a Joe Francis type who publicly refuses to comply with Jennifer’s demands that she not sleep with him. You know how, during and shortly after wartime, people will sometimes publicly strip, beat, shave, and otherwise humiliate women who have slept with the enemy? You’ll be glad to know that this is actually feminist…as is Jack the Ripper. Muslims are broadly singled out as backwards misogynists who speak a “nonsense language” (for views that fundamentalist Christians also hold, but you don’t hear about them). I don’t know if Walker is a TERF; there’s a passage where Plum muses about her uterus, but a woman can have feelings about her uterus without it being a statement on all women or all uteri. However, the book is obviously SWERF-y, racist, and absolutely brutal to any woman who doesn’t toe the party line, so I don’t like those odds.

Hot Goodreads Take: “Hip-hop is singled out as the most misogynist genre,” points out one reader. I knew I forgot something!

loading