Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

7 reviews

maddramaqueen's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

This book rocks.  Literally everyone should at least try to read it.  I recognize that it can be triggering, and it was for me, but especially for straight-size people who have not experienced anti-fat bias on a societal level this is absolutely necessary.  Even as a fat person myself I learned so much about the violence facing those fatter than me that I was entirely unaware of.

If you can't handle the topics covered, I fully understand.  I'm in eating disorder recovery myself and this topic was triggering for me.  But the final chapter is one of the greatest pieces of activist writing I've ever read and I think everyone should read that chapter *at least*.  

Thank you so much for writing this, Aubrey Gordon.  It will be an oft recommended book in my future.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body shaming, Bullying, Medical trauma, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Sexism, Hate crime, Medical content, Misogyny, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Fatphobia, and Sexual harassment

Moderate: Ableism, Chronic illness, Drug use, Death, Child abuse, Dysphoria, Toxic relationship, Gaslighting, Classism, Eating disorder, Domestic abuse, Rape, Mental illness, Misogyny, Racism, Colonisation, Transphobia, Toxic friendship, Drug abuse, Stalking, and Terminal illness

hollowhallow13's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Eating disorder, Sexual harassment, Medical trauma, Sexism, Child abuse, Fatphobia, Medical content, and Body shaming

dragon_s_hoard's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Sexual harassment, Racism, Self harm, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Toxic friendship, Sexism, Sexual assault, Body shaming, Child abuse, Fatphobia, Sexual violence, Ableism, Emotional abuse, Medical trauma, Bullying, Eating disorder, Medical content, Misogyny, and Pandemic/Epidemic

Moderate: Chronic illness, Lesbophobia, Dysphoria, Gaslighting, Panic attacks/disorders, Police brutality, Classism, Transphobia, and Biphobia

stevia333k's review against another edition

informative inspiring tense

4.5

This is a good book when I'm trying to get a different angle on conversion torture because this book is geared for the intersection of fat activism & feminism. i recommend this book. basically, screw the myth of willpower. i would say the book is scary with its descriptions of street harassment & assault, but there's a sort of horror of oppression that's alluded to but not explicitly gotten to, even though there is a lot of connections talked about throughout the book. that being said i'm adding these next 2 paragraphs in order to help synthesize what i got from this book with other information i've seen, especially since i haven't read like academic journals about fat rights, fat liberation, fat studies, etc. while i have marked it with spoiler formatting, please note that i have added information that are from other sources.

That being said, I feel like the book has a lot of emphasis on hatred against fat people, when i noticed that a lot of the bullying i faced in school was connected to people trying to assimilate & suck up to the teachers. it's the trying to get closer to enclosured power as opposed to breaking that privatization & getting it distributed equitably.

like there's 2 things i think of at least: the military wanting a one-size-fits-all outfit to make gear standardized (they ended up having to make 3 sizes), and how fatness is used to play into desireability politics to cover up how white patriarchs raped black perceived-females. like, i sense those were meant to be simmering in the background, (we literally started out with how fatphobia is connected to militarism, and how fatphobia is compared to an "epidemic" like how bourgeois depictions of famine refugees as zombies & "great replacement" canard works with settler colonizers. but again, these are left lower-key.)

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Chronic illness, Hate crime, Sexual harassment, Transphobia, Forced institutionalization, Sexual assault, War, Ableism, Body shaming, Fatphobia, Grief, Stalking, Violence, Bullying, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Rape, Child abuse, Eating disorder, Gaslighting, Sexual violence, Medical content, Racism, and Sexism

ellaxiao's review

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.75

Highly Rec for anyone ready to dive past the “body positivity” movement into real fat justice and body justice, I think would be super eye opening for most size privileged folks to see the details of structural and systemic fatphobia that go under witnessed and reported 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body shaming and Fatphobia

Moderate: Medical trauma, Sexual violence, and Child abuse

jamieruwen's review

emotional informative medium-paced

4.0

An essential for the modern leftist. Fat justice is one the most underexposed topics in our conversations about justice, and Gordon delivers here an insight into fat life, fat suffering, fat marginalisation and medicalisation that body positivity has epically failed to do. She also shines a light on an alternative approach: fat justice. Ultimately, we cannot achieve full bodily autonomy and liberation without including fat justice, and this becomes obvious especially in the last chapter of this book. The suffering of fat people at the hands of thin friends & family, the concern trolling, the exclusion of fat people from our conversations about self-determination, the absolute disdain of the medical establishment towards fat people, the societal abuse of fat children: Gordon covers it all, and she does it with grace and accessible language. Her inclusion at every turn of disabled people and transgender people, highlighting the way those groups often suffer intersecting marginalisation is enlightening and shows Gordon has done the work necessary to comfortably write a book like this. You will find no crescendos of “as long as you’re healthy” here.

What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat is in many ways, especially when covering personal experiences, quintessentially American: many societies have different body standards, not all countries are as size-exclusionary as the U.S. However, do not be fooled by this: systemic fatphobia exists in your society too, and fatphobia exists within you. The fat people in your life know this already. There is no escape, as Gordon shows, from the diet industry and it’s Western, thin, white, able-bodied, cisgender beauty ideal. I especially latched onto Gordon’s bold and completely true critique of the Body Positivity movement. What body positivity has failed to do is show us how our discomfort with bodies that deviate from that standard seep into other aspects of our society. As Gordon puts it: 

Over time, body positivity has made its constituency clear. It has widened the warm and fickle embrace of beauty standards ever so slightly. Now it showers its affections not only on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 4 but on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 12.
 
Body positivity has widened the circle of acceptable bodies, yes, but it still leaves so many of us by the wayside. Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life.

Our greatest challenges are not internal. They are systemic. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia

Moderate: Child abuse and Eating disorder

junefish's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia, Body shaming, and Bullying

Moderate: Chronic illness and Self harm

Minor: Abortion, Child abuse, Transphobia, Violence, Xenophobia, Suicidal thoughts, Stalking, and Sexual violence