how to be a "skinny bitch".

Not your typical boring diet book, this is a tart-tongued, no-holds-barred wakeup call to all women who want to be thin. With such blunt advice as, "Soda is liquid Satan" and "You are a total moron if you think the Atkins Diet will make you thin," it's a rallying cry for all savvy women to start eating healthy and looking radiant. Unlike standard diet books, it actually makes the reader laugh out loud with its truthful, smart-mouthed revelations. Behind all the attitude, however, there's solid guidance. Skinny Bitch espouses a healthful lifestyle that promotes whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, and encourages women to get excited about feeling "clean and pure and energized."

Image and Synopsis Source:
http://www.amazon.com/Skinny-Bitch-Rory-Freedman/dp/0762424931/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295643039&sr=8-1

Skinny Bitch is every woman's worst enemy. If you want a dieting book that rips your self-esteem and dignity, look no further because this book has it all. Written by a former modeling agent Rory Freedman and former model Kim Barnouin, these so-called experts have developed a dieting book in which being thin is being beautiful and healthy. By taking on this role of "expertise", Freedman and Barnouin take their skewed vision of health and bestow it on the "lucky ones" that purchase their book. As if buying the book isn't enough, both authors demean their audience nonstop by blaming them for becoming the way that they are: fat, stupid, and undesirable. Here is an excerpt from the book:

"Okay. Use your head. You need to get healthy if you want to get skinny. Health = skinny. Unhealthy = fat. The first thing you need to do is give up your gross vices. Don't act surprised! You cannot keep eating the same shit and expect to get skinny. Or smoke." Oddly enough, Freedman and Barnouin --renowned "experts"-- epitomize what public health is now shifting towards, "an increasing attention to body shape, diet, and exercise... the 'lifestyle' focus" (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 1).

Public health expertise in the recent years has become a study on the social condition of life where "expert knowledge" is used to convey messages of what is healthy and what is not. These ideals began back in the mid-1970's where academic papers were published in regards to the correlation between lifestyle choices and health. Most of the data concluded that "...it is 'lifestyles'-- lack of exercise, poor diet, overconsumption of certain products, exposure to hazardous chemicals, and so on-- that make people ill." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 15) Not only do Freedman and Barnouin's book put focus on the importance of eating healthy, they also use this opportunity to promote veganism and to state all of the terrible chemical additives in our foods such as sulfites in wine, aspartame, and refined sugars all of which are carcinogenic. The authors also exemplify what Metcalfe (1993, pg. 41) mentions as "health promoters who wish to turn people into calorific and cholesterol counting machines." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 15)

Skinny Bitch not only emphasizes the importance of eating right, it also projects the idea that eating meat is the most unhealthy thing you can do to your body (here is where the experts demonstrate that they're truly not experts at all...). Freedman and Barnouin relay that "... the meat on your plate is rotting, filled with pus, and decomposing..." and that when you eat fresh vegetables and fruits, they are alive and excellent for your body. (Um, excuse me?) The epidemiology article correlates with this idea of how public health has changed our views about certain foods, as Freedman and Barnouin point out: ".. the 'fact' that dietary fat leads to obesity and heart disease, for example, has meant that many people have almost a horror of fat, to the extent that the very sight or smell of it causes disgust." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 50) This book as well as other dieting books has placed so much focus on what it means to be healthy but now I'm starting to question if Western society truly knows what it means to be healthy anymore? Do we all think like Freedman and Barnouin in the sense that being thin means being healthy? If so, then I have very little faith in humanity. An important quote from the epidemiology article sums up the issues with public health: "Epidemiology is thus one of the central strategies in the new public health used to construct notions of 'health' and, through this construction, to invoke and reproduce moral judgments about the worth of individuals and social groups." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 60)

Skinny Bitch is not about dieting or veganism. I believe it is about control, indulging in eating disorders, and criticizing a group of people for what they look like. Similarly, if the focus continues to be on the presentations of our individual bodies, are we pushing away the actual concept of public health? Are we so concerned as to what the human body should look like as opposed to warding off diseases that we go to desperate measures to assume the role of experts and dictate how people should live their lives? Freedman and Barnouin, both of who were in the modeling business and have no prior knowledge of health, patronize those who don't fall into the dominant health norms of "healthism". Using Skinny Bitch as an example, Metcalfe (1993, pg. 35) goes to mention that, "Healthism... can lead to a general intolerance of those who subscribe to the dominant health norms against those who do not or cannot." (Peterson, Lupton, pg. 26) Unfortunately, this looks like the path that public health has chosen.

how to woo a lady.

Source: http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/sperm.asp

Imagine yourself as an attractive young woman who walks into a bar full of men. As soon as your heels click onto the tiled floors, 30+ pairs of male eyes are drawn to you and the only thought running through their minds is how they can win your affection tonight. At once, six men come at you ready to bombard you with pathetic pick-up lines while two more men lag behind, plotting out their form of attack. As you reject each of the eight men, one more comes up to you. You mentally take out that list of characteristics you want in a man and you see that this man matches up right to the detail. To top it off, he hands you a drink and this little act of kindness seals the deal. You have a date tonight.

Now turn your attention to the image above. This comic portrays the pre-fertilization process in which the newly-released population of sperm race to their final destination, the egg. In this image, the viewer gets a glance at how competitive the process truly is by displaying sperm all around this central sperm, who is equipped with flowers and bottle of wine. His buddy even makes the comment, "Hmm... clever" and clearly knows that this sperm knows how to woo a potential partner.

Unfortunately, the mechanism of fertilization is not so romantic. The inside of the vagina is not equipped with shops of wine and flowers where sperm can stop by and pick up a few things to win the affection of the egg. It's a very scientific process in which 300 million sperm try all at once to penetrate the egg and produce a zygote.

Emily Martin's article, "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles" addresses this idea of romanticizing the scientific process of fertilization. She first opens this statement by saying, "It is remarkable how 'femininely' the egg behaves and how 'masculinely' the sperm behaves" (Martin, pg. 489)and continues to describe the egg as being passive while the sperm is pro-active. This relates back to the story above where the female is essentially passive and is hounded by men who all want her affection. The man that wins the female's affection is considered to be the hero and the winner of the game while the female is just a prize to be won. Even on the biological level, the same case goes: the sperm that is able to penetrate the egg and induce fertilization holds a great deal of significance.

Taking on these gender roles and romanticizing the science of fertilization leads to what Gerald and Helen Schatten mention in Martin's article as, "the egg's role to that of Sleeping Beauty..." (Martin, pg. 490) where the egg plays the role of the sleeping princess who can only be awoken by her true love's kiss. However, Martin's purpose of this article is to debunk the significance of the sperm as being the sole inducer of fertilization. This lies mostly in the common perception that it is the sperm that has to trek through "the caves" on a dangerous journey and it is the sperm that needs to rescue the egg before it dies within hours. Once again, the notion of the egg as the "damsel in distress" is used to place greater significance on the "heroic" sperm, indicating that the egg is helpless and dependent on the sperm.

Perhaps it is just in our nature to idealize this process of procreation and to make it more than just a biological occurrence. What more could be more romantic than to say that this specific sperm "wooed" the egg and together they formed the first cell made in creating a living organism? As Martin continues with the article, she explains that while not all of biology may be used in regards to culture, this particular segment of fertilization is. Assigning these two distinct gametes with genders is almost universal solely because it is based on biology; sperm comes from males and eggs come from females so it is natural to assign them the respective gender roles. However, in Western culture, it has become popular to glamorize the mechanism of fertilization to be one that correlates to humans on a macro-scale.

Like the aforementioned example story of the men competing for the woman at the bar or the comic image of the competing sperm, it all dwindles down to our cultural portrayals of the male-female gender roles in biology. Whether it is on a micro-scale or on a macro-scale, as humans, it is sometimes difficult for some to understand processes without giving it a reason as to why it's happening. Therefore, giving the story of the "damsel in distress" and the "heroic sperm" can just be viewed as a reason as to why this all happens in the first place.