Book picks similar to
The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness by Kim Chernin
non-fiction
feminism
nonfiction
psychology
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
Arlie Russell Hochschild - 1983
But what happens when this system of adjusting emotions is adapted to commercial purposes? Hochschild examines the cost of this kind of "emotional labor." She vividly describes from a humanist and feminist perspective the process of estrangement from personal feelings and its role as an "occupational hazard" for one-third of America's workforce.
The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980
Elaine Showalter - 1985
A vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is often a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.
Lying in Weight: The Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women
Trisha Gura - 2007
And then what?In this groundbreaking new book, science journalist Trisha Gura, Ph.D., explodes the myth that those who suffer from eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, are primarily teenage girls. In reality, these diseases linger from adolescence or emerge anew in the lives of adult women in ways that we are only starting to recognize.Millions of American women twenty-five and older suffer from serious food issues, from obsessions with calorie counting to compulsions to starve then overeat. Because of the assumption that age provides eating-disordered immunity, the medical and mental health communities have long overlooked these women and minimized their dangerous habits. Yet the number of women in their thirties, forties, and older now seeking treatment is double and triple that of five years ago. The growing awareness of this understudied population is raising relevant questions: How does an adult woman's eating disorder affect her choice of a husband—or his choice of her? How does she cope with her expanding body during pregnancy? How does she feed her children when she cannot properly feed herself? And how does she weather aging in a culture that informs all women that they can never be too old to be too thin?Drawing on her own experience with anorexia, the most up-to-date research, and extensive interviews with clinicians and sufferers, Gura addresses these concerns and concludes that eating disorders, at least some vestigeof them, tend to lie dormant throughout a woman's life. Eating disorders in adults may not replicate those of adolescents and tend to emerge at the most vulnerable periods in a woman's life—marriage, the birth of a child, stress from child rearing, marital difficulties, depression, and menopause. Though the media may tell us that the girl with an eating disorder overcomes her demons with age and hard work, the reality is that she often doesn't. A girl with an eating disorder is a woman prone to relapse.Lying in Weight is a startling, timely, and imperative investigation of eating disorders "all grown up." Women are suffering from a hidden, horrid, and life-threatening epidemic. This book is a shot across the bow to confront the problem and address the real issues. Isn't it time to end the suffering?
Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
Ruby Tandoh - 2018
She will arm you against the fad diets, food crazes and bad science that can make eating guilt-laden and expensive, drawing eating inspiration from influences as diverse as Roald Dahl and Nora Ephron. Filled with straight-talking, sympathetic advice on everything from mental health to recipe ideas and shopping tips, this is a book that clears away the fog, to help you fall back in love with food.
The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls
Joan Jacobs Brumberg - 1997
. . a work of impassioned advocacy." --PeopleA hundred years ago, women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their daughters to do the same. The ideal of the day, however, was inner beauty: a focus on good deeds and a pure heart. Today American women have more social choices and personal freedom than ever before. But fifty-three percent of our girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of thirteen, and many begin a pattern of weight obsession and dieting as early as eight or nine. Why?In The Body Project, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg answers this question, drawing on diary excerpts and media images from 1830 to the present. Tracing girls' attitudes toward topics ranging from breast size and menstruation to hair, clothing, and cosmetics, she exposes the shift from the Victorian concern with inner beauty to our modern focus on outward appearance--in particular, the desire to be model-thin and sexy. Compassionate, insightful, and gracefully written, The Body Project explores the gains and losses adolescent girls have inherited since they shed the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of sexual freedom and consumerism--a world in which the body is their primary project."Joan Brumberg's book offers us an insightful and entertaining history behind the destructive mantra of the '90s--'I hate my body!'" --Katie Couric
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
Amia Srinivasan - 2021
Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.
Gaining: The Truth about Life After Eating Disorders
Aimee Liu - 1979
Now, three decades later, Liu shares her story and those of her peers who are still struggling to understand the role anorexia and bulimia have played in their lives.
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
Anne Fausto-Sterling - 2000
In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.
Empty
Susan Burton - 2020
She just knew she felt her best when she was empty, "like a straw", as she says "something you could blow through."For almost thirty years, Susan Burton has hidden her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents' abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But she hadn't escaped unscathed, and in the fallout from her parents' breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology." She entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success--she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse--she'd binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again--and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to "quit food."Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of story; brings to life an indelible cast of characters; and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.
Good Girls Don't Get Fat: How Weight Obsession Is Messing Up Our Girls and How We Can Help Them Thrive Despite It
Robyn Silverman - 2010
Robyn Silverman's groundbreaking research at Tufts University, and filled with searingly honest young voices, Good Girls Don't Get Fat:– Decodes the ripple effects of actions that damage our girls—and provides tools to help stop them.– Shines light on the positive influence of women who embrace body types of any size—and explains how to model the right behavior.– Shows how girls, whatever their size, can own their strengths, trust their power and accomplish amazing things.
The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan - 1963
Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
Susan Brownmiller - 1975
In lucid, persuasive prose, Brownmiller has created a definitive, devastating work of lasting social importance.Chosen by THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW as One of the Outstanding Books of the Year
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
Sarah Jaffe - 2021
You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth -- the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries -- from the unpaid intern, to the overworked nurse, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete -- Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.
The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
Dorothy Dinnerstein - 1976
Person, author of The Sexual Century "Still the most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration, its re-release is a celebratory occasion."–Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women and Mortality "[The Mermaid and the Minotaur] continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere."–Jessica Benjamin, author of The Bonds of Love
The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
Carol J. Adams - 1990
In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate.
Praise for The Sexual Politics of Meat:
CAROL J. ADAMS i
s the author of The Pornography of Meat (Continuum, 2004), and co-author of Beyond Animal Rights (Continuum, 2000), and The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Jane Austen (Continuum, 2008). She has toured as a speaker throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. More information can be found at her website: http://www.triroc.com/caroladams