Last month, I showed you a video where Julie Klausner carved up the diet book market, including her scathing commentary on the Skinny Bitch series. Now she’s turned her criticisms into a short, swift attack in Salon against the trendy tome she calls “a PETA pamphlet in chick-lit clothing and an innovative fusion of animal rights activism with punitive dieting tactics that prey on women’s insecurities about their bodies.”
“Thanks to Skinny Bitch,” Klausner writes, “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 self-flagellation—penance for the sin of being too fat. Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model [Kim Barnouin] and a former modeling agent [Rory Freedman] putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. ‘If you eat crap,’ they chirp, ‘you are crap.'”