Dear Skinny B*tch, Abusing Women Is Disgusting

I saw the amazing Food, Inc. today, courtesy of the Philadelphia Film Festival. More on that tomorrow, perhaps.

After the screening, they announced that there were free copies of the #1 New York Times bestselling book Skinny Bitch available in the lobby for anyone who wanted one. My friend and I decided we could share a copy, but she let me bring it home tonight because we were both offended enough that I clearly had to write about it immediately.

If you haven't heard about this atrocity, it's a pro-veganism rant that includes loads of disclaimers about how its public abuse of women's psyches is just "tough love." Right. Here are some of the ways women and their bodies are referred to that jumped out on a quick skim, direct quotes, all:

"... fat pig ... lumpy ass ... pussies ... gluttonous pig ... selfish whores ... don't be a pussy ... bitch-slap it ... Also, we have some fat, gross body parts, too. We're women. ..."

There are, among the insults, smart things in this book. Like warnings on the dangers of aspartame, which is goddam toxic waste, along with all its artificial sweetener cousins. Or encouragements to eat organic, because food from soil that hasn't been thoroughly killed gets better trace nutrient availability. The perils of pesticides are punchily summed up. But I mostly don't care.

Mainly because I can find other sources for this information that don't call me a fat pig, or use slang for my genitalia as an insulting synonym for weakness of character.

That's really a bigger problem than complaining that pesticides end up in industrial meat, like they're unique to animal foods and the authors don't know what crop dusters are for. Or complaining about the hormones fed to factory-farmed animals, then encouraging readers to load up on estrogenic soy foods. Or railing about the rocket fuel found in milk, without seeming to have noticed that it's also found in lettuce - in both cases because California's agricultural water supply is contaminated with perchlorate from the plant of an Air Force supplier in Nevada - and not just "feed crops for cattle."

Those selective omissions are just self-serving, inconsistent, and stupid, not actively evil, like the book's misogyny.

Establishing Authority

When my great-great-grandfather met my great-great-grandmother, she was washing clothes by hand on a washboard near a stream. He 'liked' her, so he threw all the wash that she'd finished down in the mud. She picked them up and re-washed them without a word. Naturally, right there and then, he decided that she was the woman for him.

He turned out, to what should have been no one's great surprise, to be a controlling, abusive psychopath whose behavior deeply scarred my great-grandfather and, by extension, my whole maternal line of descent.

Women have been used to being abused and demeaned by authority figures in their lives for a long, long time. It's still a popular public hobby, engaged in by both men and women. Its subtle forms are in no way less demeaning than the actions of my utter creep of a great-great-grandfather, because it trains them to seek out and be loyal to their own abusers.

Women have for a long time been reinforcing this utterly evil and systemic abuse of other women through slut-shaming, gossip, recapitulation of misogynist insults and the other types of passive-aggressive violence allowed to women and evident in all populations whose power to speak frankly and express self-respect is suppressed.

It isn't cute. It isn't fresh. It isn't hip or funny.

It's abusive and cruel. End. No context excuses it.

It's a cheap trick for establishing authority over people who've been made to feel worthless and cued to be subservient. It's a message that, regardless of disclaimers, only empowers a misogynist worldview and teaches women to accept abusive treatment as normal.

You know why it took me over four *ing years to figure out that my first husband was a horror of a human being? Because by the time my misogynist pastors, gossipy church women, spanking parents, and passive-aggressive, guilt-wielding mother got done raising me, I expected to be treated like trash and humiliated at the drop of a hat.

That was just normal to me. Years of it made me dangerously depressed and self-destructive. Nervous. Anxious. Sleepless. Fearful and timid. It still makes my chest tighten to think about some of it, even though I am thousands of miles and years away from all of that.

It was not a *ing joke for the amusement of some self-righteous little psychos pitching a diet plan because they love the little animals.

One in Three

The people that it's acceptable to psychologically abuse are often subject to elevated levels of physical violence. Marked out as targets, as less worthy, when bad things happen to them, it's somehow a little less awful.

The United Nations reported in 2006 that, worldwide, one in three women is subjected to intimate violence. US abuse statistics indicate that as of 2005, a third of female murder victims were killed by an intimate partner, and as of 2006, 600 women were sexually assaulted every day. All this abuse takes a serious financial toll on the women who survive it in the form of health care costs and lost productivity.

It is not *ing funny to those women, or their children. It's not funny to the decent men and women who help to pick up the pieces.

Every person seeking to give women advice who tries to establish a right to be heard by insulting them in sexist terms and using bitch-slap casually, in utter contempt of the women they are talking to who have actually had that done to them, is a person whose advice women don't need.

Have you been bitch-slapped? I have. By my parents. By my ex-husband.

It was years ago, but it hasn't gotten any *ing funnier with time. It still makes my heart race and brings out a cold sweat if I think about it too much.

I used to not be able to catch a single goddam thing that was thrown to me because the only response I could muster to someone raising a hand my direction was to put my own hands up to protect myself.

The world and its food supply is not going to be made safe by keeping slightly more than half the world's population in a state of fear and self-loathing.

In Conclusion

So seriously, Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, you are disgusting *ing people. And f* you for ruining my evening.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need a *ing drink.

(Photo credit: purpleslog on Flickr.)

[Update: Not directly related, but body image matters a lot. Young women are told in a myriad of ways that so much rides on whether they can be considered beautiful, and when that automatically excludes them, it does a lot of damage. Women need to have each other's backs on this score.]