Official Review: Era of the Beautiful Woman
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ciecheesemeister
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Official Review: Era of the Beautiful Woman
[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Era of the Beautiful Woman" by Valeria Johnson.]
Era of the Beautiful Women by Valeria Johnson is a self-improvement text encouraging women to cease relying on products such as cosmetics and hair color to create artificial beauty and to stop relying on male approval as a measure of self-worth. On the surface, these might seem like beneficial suggestions. However, the book begins with a scathing introduction rife with shaming and judgment.
The author inquires: “Have you entered a restaurant before and saw a sixteen year old placing an order for food that your whole family feeds on? I’m sure you were taken aback when you eventually found out that all that heap was for her.”
I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anyone, sixteen years old or any other age, placing an order for food that my “whole family feeds on.” I would not pay enough attention to the stranger to realize that “all that heap was for her,” and even if I was aware that the food was all for her, it is not my place to judge. I would probably enjoy the random teenager’s company more than the author’s, seeing as being in the presence of judgmental people tends to give me indigestion.
Saying “what a wretched pile of rubbish” two pages into a book does not bode well for the rest of the reading experience, but since it was a short book I decided to soldier on.
The book tells the story of Samantha, a twenty-six-year-old author with a string of bad relationships behind her. Samantha is an unhappy woman who envies her twin sister Karen’s happy marriage and slender physique. There is a great deal of disapproving discussion on the author’s part about Samantha’s proclivity for changing her hair color and her tendency towards emotional eating.
It seems to me that Samantha is depressed and would benefit from counseling in hopes of becoming self-reliant and recognizing the positive aspects of her inner self rather than focusing on superficial qualities and believing that she is worth nothing without a romantic partner. The author, however, focuses on Samantha’s need to stop dyeing her hair and to eat a raw food diet so she will shed her icky flab because fat is the very worst thing that a person can possibly be.
The writing style isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but sentences such as the following one describing Samantha’s sister Karen are cringe-inducing.
“Hair lustrous, full and long, skin so suave you could lick whipped cream off of her.”
I could go the rest of my life never reading another sentence like that and be happy.
There was nothing that I liked about this book, and it should come as no surprise that I am giving Era of the Beautiful Women one out of four stars. It is rife with appearance shaming, size shaming, ableism, misogyny, and stigmatizing of mental health conditions. It trivializes eating disorders, implying that people struggling with these conditions, particularly binge eating disorder, should simply have the willpower to stop engaging in self-destructive behavior without help. The diet the author praises promotes imbalanced nutrition if not full-on disordered eating. This is truly one of the worst books I have ever had the displeasure of reading.
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Era of the Beautiful Woman
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Era of the Beautiful Women by Valeria Johnson is a self-improvement text encouraging women to cease relying on products such as cosmetics and hair color to create artificial beauty and to stop relying on male approval as a measure of self-worth. On the surface, these might seem like beneficial suggestions. However, the book begins with a scathing introduction rife with shaming and judgment.
The author inquires: “Have you entered a restaurant before and saw a sixteen year old placing an order for food that your whole family feeds on? I’m sure you were taken aback when you eventually found out that all that heap was for her.”
I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anyone, sixteen years old or any other age, placing an order for food that my “whole family feeds on.” I would not pay enough attention to the stranger to realize that “all that heap was for her,” and even if I was aware that the food was all for her, it is not my place to judge. I would probably enjoy the random teenager’s company more than the author’s, seeing as being in the presence of judgmental people tends to give me indigestion.
Saying “what a wretched pile of rubbish” two pages into a book does not bode well for the rest of the reading experience, but since it was a short book I decided to soldier on.
The book tells the story of Samantha, a twenty-six-year-old author with a string of bad relationships behind her. Samantha is an unhappy woman who envies her twin sister Karen’s happy marriage and slender physique. There is a great deal of disapproving discussion on the author’s part about Samantha’s proclivity for changing her hair color and her tendency towards emotional eating.
It seems to me that Samantha is depressed and would benefit from counseling in hopes of becoming self-reliant and recognizing the positive aspects of her inner self rather than focusing on superficial qualities and believing that she is worth nothing without a romantic partner. The author, however, focuses on Samantha’s need to stop dyeing her hair and to eat a raw food diet so she will shed her icky flab because fat is the very worst thing that a person can possibly be.
The writing style isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but sentences such as the following one describing Samantha’s sister Karen are cringe-inducing.
“Hair lustrous, full and long, skin so suave you could lick whipped cream off of her.”
I could go the rest of my life never reading another sentence like that and be happy.
There was nothing that I liked about this book, and it should come as no surprise that I am giving Era of the Beautiful Women one out of four stars. It is rife with appearance shaming, size shaming, ableism, misogyny, and stigmatizing of mental health conditions. It trivializes eating disorders, implying that people struggling with these conditions, particularly binge eating disorder, should simply have the willpower to stop engaging in self-destructive behavior without help. The diet the author praises promotes imbalanced nutrition if not full-on disordered eating. This is truly one of the worst books I have ever had the displeasure of reading.
******
Era of the Beautiful Woman
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Latest Review: Wild World by Peter S. Rush
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JoyALB
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How disappointing! These are real issues that women deal with; it’s sad that the author approached these with bias and judgement. Thank you for the awesome review. I will skip on reading this.
Latest Review: Mixed Blessings by J.M. Muse
