A cacophony of complaint

What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old and subsequently goes on to eat herself to over 40 stone? Probably the sort of monster who’s never read a book about fatness as a feminist issue which she found convincing. Here we go again: ‘This is what most girls are taught — we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. And most women know this — that we are supposed to disappear.’

This ignores the fact that plump women were a benchmark of beauty in the past — when women had no rights whatsoever — and still are in cultures where, again, women have very few rights. Fashion, not fascism, decrees desirability, and a culture which favours thin women is generally the culture where women are free.

Roxane Gay’s breakthrough book was called Bad Feminist. But she is ‘bad’ only in the way that prissy people think of frivolous things as ‘guilty pleasures’.