Anyone want a cookie?

Interesting first-person article and book review on eating disorders (Starved to Perfection). For the most part, I think it's well done. Provides some interesting statistics. Here's my one-liner. The book reviewed (Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body), evidently includes the the following quote to help explain the commonality of eating disorders:

“We are the daughters of feminists who said, ‘You can be anything,’ and we heard, ‘You have to be everything.’ ”

Perhaps, to an extent true. Childhood, parental relationships, etc. Yup, they all have an effect. But the article's author really shows her feminism at the end:

Over the course of the past three decades, men have been pursuing unnatural bulk and women exaggerated thinness, as if the world were such a small and symbiotic place that the weight they gain is the weight that we must lose, as if we need to minimize ourselves to make room for them.

I am a true feminist. I completely believe in equal rights for women. But a common criticism of some feminists is their need to explain all female "bad" behavior as somehow a function of men. Yeah, women have no choice but to have eating disorders because men are getting bigger. What we need is some man to come along and argue the opposite: We poor men are obligated to gain all that weight you malicious women are losing. What the hell. If all we gotta do is make shit up, with no supporting evidence, we can make it up to look like women are to blame, too.