Feb. 11, 2008 www.salon.com| The bestselling diet book provocatively titled “Skinny Bitch” features on its cover a line drawing of a lithe fashionista in a little black dress. Also on its cover is a pitch to “savvy girls” to “stop eating crap and start looking fabulous!” Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, the authors of “Skinny Bitch” and its recently released follow-up cookbook, “Skinny Bitch in the Kitch,” have surpassed Jessica Seinfeld’s broccoli-spiked brownies to create the bait-and-switch diet book of the year.
The “Skinny Bitch” empire has proven so popular, in fact, that soon men will be part of the franchise, with Freedman and Barnouin’s guy-targeted sequel, “Skinny Bastard,” slated for release in 2009 (no word on whether Vincent Gallo will be the cover model). Barnouin left her modeling career to get a degree in holistic nutrition at what the New York Times called, in deadpan, an “unaccredited school for alternative health,” and Freedman, a former modeling agent, describes herself as a “self-taught know-it-all” in her bio.
The relentless bullying peppered throughout the authors’ advice accounts for much of the book’s humor, including quips like “you need to exercise, you lazy shit,” “coffee is for pussies” and “don’t be a fat pig anymore.” It was a formerly anorexic friend of mine who nailed it when she read excerpts from the book. “When you have an eating disorder,” she told me, “that’s the voice you hear in your head all the time.”
Thanks to “Skinny Bitch,” 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 (Barnouin) and a former modeling agent (Freedman) putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. “If you eat crap,” they chirp, “you are crap.”
It’s a heavily agenda’d method of preying on the dieter, whose mind is weak from starvation and preoccupation with nothing but food. Have you tried to hold a conversation with somebody on a diet? The first 10 pounds they lose are mostly brain. Christian diet books like Gwen Shamblin’s “Weigh Down Diet” and “What Would Jesus Eat?” (a real cookbook by Don Colbert, no relation to the comedian) sell copies based on the same reasoning.
They mischievously confide that they gave their book its title just to sell copies, which is why there are zero references to their veganism on the cover as well. They’re deceptive, not stupid: These women don’t seem to have any viable weight loss advice beyond offering unsustainable daily menus of less than 1,000 calories a day and advising you to repeat Deepak Chopra mantras that assure you, “Every day in every way, [your] ass is getting smaller.”
As far as Freedman and Barnouin are concerned, however, there is no wrong way to get girls to “go veegs,” even if it does require a little bit of sneaky marketing and the kind of hate-fueled body criticism they learned from the modeling industry back in the day. And just as Freedman can’t “wrap [her] mind around” women who “spent $14 on a book that was not what they thought, but [who aren't] mad that chickens are having beaks chopped off their faces,” it’s tough to reconcile the terms “cruelty-free” with women who seem dead-set on remaking scores of dieting women in their own image — as the skinniest, nastiest bitches around.
