I wanted to talk about the Skinny Bitch girls a bit more, just because a few people who've seen the 236.com diet video were amazed that they were real.
The distinguishing feature about their book, whose best-seller status owes all to a photo of Posh with SB in hand, incongruous to her assertion that she only drinks Diet Coke because she "hates the taste of water" (Skinny Bitch asserts, hilariously, that "Soda is Liquid Satan"), is that it's a PETA pamphlet in Chick Lit clothing; the literary bait-and-switch of the year.
Deceptively Abusive!
So, aspiring Bergdorf Blondes pop a copy of this tempeh-fueled bile into their shopping bags at boutiques, and soon enough, they're being regaled with anecdotes about live cows skinned alive on the assembly line, and told that humans are the only animals dumb enough to drink milk beyond infancy. Oh, and here's my ish' with that line of reasoning, by the way: you know what else humans are the only animals to do? Write books. Fly planes. Invent the internet. Also, civilization. Fuck you with that "we're the only ones who BLANK" line of reasoning, because it's our giant brains that invented reasoning, hippie. Should I scoot my butt on the carpet after using the loo because my cat does, or should I prop myself up on the shoulders of the giants kind enough to create Charmin?
I did, by the way, read this book from top to bottom, and I'll tell you the Shamalayan-grade twist ending if you don't mind a spoiler. As their book winds down, Rory & Kim admit that teaching you how to be skinny isn't what they're about at all. They list their favorite vegan junk food, which they promise "tastes so good, your pubes will fall out." They mischievously confide that they gave their book its title to sell copies, which is why there are zero references to their veganism on the cover as well: vegans sell hacky sacks; not blockbuster paperbacks. In other words; these women don't give a shit about your bodies. They just want to tell you how disgusting eggs are, and how shitty you are for wanting to eat fish.
The relentless bullying tone of this book has provoked incredulous comments from friends of mine previously unfamiliar with Rory & Kim's "funny jokes" like "coffee is for pussies" and "stop being a moron." It was a friend of mine who'd battled anorexia as a teenager who nailed it square in the jaw once she read excerpts from the book. "When you have an eating disorder," she told me, "that's the voice you hear in the head all the time."
What a convenience! Now women who hate their bodies no longer need rely on their own self-loathing to stoke the flames of what seems like motivation, but is actually the pervasive symptom of the modern gal's disease of affluence: beating yourself up for going off your diet. Now you can have a former model & former modeling agent put your transgression in the black & white terms of right and wrong. Because if you've ever met anyone more sanctimonious than a vegan, he knocked on your door one afternoon wearing a short-sleeved white button-down, and asked for a moment of your time.
It's a revolutionary mode of preying on the weak dieter's mind; Christian diet books sell based on the same punitive reasoning. If you go off the Skinny Bitch "diet" and eat a scoop of ice cream instead of a Rice Dream crap sandwich, not only are you off-track, you're morally abhorrent. You're contributing to cruelty against animals, you fat piece of shit. And who cares if the crap sandwich has more calories or more ingredients with unpronounceable chemical suffixes than the real thing. It's more sanctimonious to use your body as a human shield to the bovine udder, and take a blow for The Cause. There is no moderation when it comes to the religious zeal of veganism, and, at least as far as the Skinny Bitches are concerned, no wrong way to lead people to its path, even if it does require a little bit of disingenuous marketing and the kind of hate-fueled body criticism they learned from the modeling industry back in the day.
And, also, again: terrycloth hoodie tube top.
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