solarcat

I just read The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls by Valorie Lee Schaefer for content, focusing on a few things, but primarily ovulation and eating disorders. It doesn't mention ovulation, and while the eating disorder section itself is fine, I wasn't impressed with the overall section on food, and there were other parts of this book that really rubbed me wrong, especially the emphasis on smiling. It's weirdly anti-salt and doesn't seem to believe that insomnia exists.

This book kept making me think "this would be great to use in some kind of dissertation on a very specific culture that this came out of, telling the young girls in this culture how best to grow up to be women." The examples alone of what concerns they thought the girls had about their bodies and their social interactions (they all seem to have very mean friends and want larger breasts, except for the one girl with large breasts, whose friends all dropped her for being ugly and fat. No one is actually fat in this book. Also their bra size chart doesn't go above 36D; people thinking that breasts can't possibly be beyond that was the source of a great many problems in my life, and I kept thinking, while reading this book, that this book would have been negatively helpful to me in my actual experience of puberty.)

So.

Does anyone have recommendations for "what to expect when you're expecting to go through puberty" that are fat-positive? You know, something like "it's very genetic and it's not because you ate too much junk food"?

And is more honest about period pain, and mentions -- at the very least -- ovulation. And that you can get back pain from your breasts.

And also -- okay, there were a bunch of things in this book that made me go "this is the opposite of helpful, I understand why you think it's helpful, but trust me, while you're not contributing to the problem, you're also not helping."

But really, the fat-positive thing would be helpful, and also more realistic about numbers on scales, please and thank you.

(And maybe ones that don't assume everyone has a mom???? I'm just. I'm just. This book is so oddly heteronormative for a book that has nothing in it about dating.)