(Part 2) Best women friendship books according to redditors

This is a fantastic and really compelling topic—thanks for posting!

> Do you think people associate being well-dressed/fashionable with being thin?

I really think a lot of people do, and it's something that we feel guilty about but can't help having internalized, after years of seeing associations of "fashionable people" as having specific kinds of "fashionable bodies". A lot of traditional "dressing for your body type" advice focuses on slenderizing and making someone appear thinner. I think that, for a lot of people (although less so on FFA—I think we're really good about this) the go-to compliment when someone is dressed in a super flattering way is, "Wow, you look so thin in that!"

I think also that people tend to be very critical of their own bodies and much kinder to others…I've personally had the experience of thinking, "I'm probably a much bigger size than this friend!" and then realizing when we swap clothes that we're about the same size. It's easy to get a distorted sense of what you look like.

Another thought—specifically on FFA, I sometimes see people complain that we don't have a great diversity of bodies posting in WAYWT (sorry for the awkward wording with that), and I really think that part of it is that we tend to have this illusion that well-dressed people are probably thinner and have more traditionally beautiful bodies. Particularly online, it's super hard to tell what size someone is, and I think when someone is very well-dressed, you'll notice how suited the outfit is to the person and how that person is expressing herself in a confident way. And you compare that to how you view yourself, which is hyperaware of your own body weirdness and perceived flaws…

I think I—and probably other FFAers—kind of recognize that we need to deprogram ourselves from what we understand as "fashionable bodies" (for our own self-confidence and also when viewing others), but it's hard to break years of internalized stereotypes.

> Do you identify with a size or try to think more about the range of sizes you wear?

Your wording of this is really interesting, because I think it gets at how I feel about size discussions—we've been socialized into identifying strongly with size as a marker for beauty/health/acceptance into the fashion world. Even body-positive messages tend to fixate on 'reclaiming' a certain size and re-pitching it as beautiful—e.g. Size 12 Is Not Fat. I really think the best way to talk about size is to realize that it's an arbitrary industry convenience, and you are not intrinsically a size 4, say, and being a size 4 instead of a 6 isn't better, and identifying as size is futile when there are so many different ways of measuring clothing size.

I largely think that it's not malicious when retailers have incredibly varying sizes, or their size range changes over time, or that things like 00s exist. It's a manufacturing convenience. They need to label their clothing. They need to make assumptions about what women are shaped as—and sometimes those assumptions feel unfair, yes, but I think the best way to go about it is to realize that those sizes aren't meant to say anything about beauty or health or women's bodies. They're just labels. (Things like having a limited size range—e.g. designer labels not going up to what's traditionally considered plus sizing—is another thing entirely, though.)

This seems to be an attempt to re-invent the celebrity fluff piece. We ignore the directions of the Main Stream Media and we chose our own celebrities. So she picks an entertainment grade alt-right celebrity called Bronze Age Pervert, BAP, and produces fairly typical, "knock him off his pedestal", guff.

She eventually gets to Jordan Peterson, but by then I'd lost interest.

Whats the actual business model here? I see the subscribe button at $48 a year, and I can imagine dozens of people in the USA paying to read this stuff, perhaps enough to pay server costs, but who pays Tara Isabella Burton's wages?

She does have a novel out https://www.amazon.com/Social-Creature-Tara-Isabella-Burton/dp/0385543522 . Viewed as a writing sample, the piece in The American Interest is going to damage sales of her novel, so it would be against her interest to write it for free.

Home to Woefield by Susan Juby takes place on Vancouver Island, and while it's not exactly about Vancouver Island per se, it's a fun read.

Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice - formerly written under the pen-name of A. N. Roquelaure.

The Marketplace, by Laura Antoniou.

Possibly The Story of O, by Pauline Reage. It's kind of a classic, but I didn't care for it much. It's a lot more about the headspace of the slave than kinky shenanigans.

There's also the movie Secretary with a very young James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It's pretty tame but makes a good starting point to gauge the reaction of a potential partner.

Should order this to work:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Your-Beeswax-Queen-Mystery/dp/0425241599