Bitchin’ Bodies

started out wanting to dislike Bitchin’ Bodies:  Young Women Talk about Body Dissatisfaction.  Why?  Because I’ve read a lot of books on this topic, and I’ve noticed an overwhelming trend in all of them:  a lot of bitching without a lot of action.  Let’s take a moment for me to flesh that out a bit.

Within the subject of women’s studies, there is a huge amount of literature devoted to women’s perceptions of their bodies, and society’s representations of women’s bodies.  Naturally, in the skinny-obsessed culture that we live in, a lot of this literature is simply angry noise about how unfair it is that women are expected to be thin to be beautiful.  You hear the statistic thrown around constantly that all women are expected to look like what only 5% of women actually look like in order to be beautiful.  This literature will often result in a lot of male stereotyping and finger pointing, without proposing solutions or examining the problem.  I was worried that Bitchin’ Bodies was going to be like this, from the title if nothing else, but instead I was pleasantly surprised.

Instead of focusing on finger pointing or fighting fire with fire, this book tries to identify the problem of body dissatisfaction and highlight how it affects young women’s lives.  The book is mostly a series of interviews, though not formal ones, with college women about their bodies and their experiences with body dissatisfaction.  The goal of the book seems to be to highlight where the problem exists and how it works in the minds of women.  In the first chapter, the author interviews freshmen as they are going through avoiding (or sometimes falling victim to) the dreaded freshman fifteen.  She moves on, in chapter two, to discuss food on college campuses.  Taking a wide sampling of university cafeterias, she finds that healthy options are often available…right next to tempting unhealthy options.  Chapter three focuses on clothing.  I found this chapter particularly interesting because it highlighted quite well  just how ridiculous women’s clothing sizes are.  Chapter four addresses the comments women deal with from their families, and how women’s bodies have become social property for all to comment on or analyze.  The next chapter, five, takes this idea further by exploring the ways women specifically comment on each other’s bodies.  Chapter six continues on in this vein by exploring the way men comment on women’s bodies.  This chapter features an interview with a sorority girl about their sisterhood-wide  dieting for spring break that I found fascinating.  Chapter seven and eight fall into a more traditional discourse of talking about media representations of women and how women seem to think that the ideal female figure is one that appears strikingly like Barbie.  Finally, Chapter nine zeroes in on everything else the book has discussed in order to drive the point home that women are constantly living in a state of body dissatisfaction in the culture that we live in.  The author even brings a few of her own experiences into the book, which made the book seem intimate and conversational, rather than preachy.  The book ends with a few appendixes describing activities that a concerned person could initiate or participate in to open a dialogue about body dissatisfaction.

I liked this book because it didn’t really propose any answers; it simply gave a voice to a lot of women on the subject of body dissatisfaction.  The author made a concerted effort not to focus on women who had eating disorders or were over-weight (not that that would have been a problem, but it has been done many times before), but instead seemed to take a broad sampling of the voices of young women on the subject, and the end result is a book that is personable but also serious on the subject of body dissatisfaction.  The book did a good job of giving the reader an overall sense of the problem, but the solution isn’t in the book, it is in the readers’ hands.