I have been thinking a lot lately about mental and physical health. It is a tricky thing to consciously lose weight when you have kids at home watching what you do, especially today when we are so much more sensitive to diet culture. When I grew up, weight was moral-- very openly. If you ate the right things, you could be the right person. Weight was a behavior, a proxy for health. And! the books I read in elementary and middle school confirmed diet culture/created it/reified it in a pretty horrifying way, as my recent eBay rabbit hole confirmed.
1. Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade: I adored this book when I was a kid, and nothing in it seemed problematic to me. A re-read reveals IT WAS ALL PROBLEMATIC. And in addition to everything written on every page about Elsie, THE KIDS HITCH A RIDE TO THE MALL in an old man's truck and have to escape and this is just, like, a throwaway b-plot. IT IS A WILD RIDE
2. Blubber by Judy Blume: I mean. Ultimately this book was about exposing the cruelty of bullying, but also? The residual message is not necessarily anti-bullying or anti-fat-shaming. The skinny popular kids are never really punished and the privileged perspective of the bully is sort of... I don't know... reveled in.
3.The Cat Ate my Gymsuit: Yikes, you guys. Marcie loses wight (after both of her parents tell her she's fat and she is negatively rewarded for her appearance at school), and even though she still has problems, MUCH IS SOLVED by weight loss. Her fatness defines her.
Dorothy read Nothing's Fair and WAS SHOCKED by it. Which is GREAT. We have made SO MUCH PROGRESS since I was a kid, but also! It has only been one generation. There is much more work to do.
The Cat Ate My Gymsuit! I remember that one. I reread Blubber recently and wow. I don't even think we need to go that far back - remember Monica's fat past on Friends? No wonder we are all fucked up.
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