"Ah, the beginning of summer. Freedom, warmth, sunshine, fresh green grass...and a certain kind of hell for women with body issues, which is to say, pretty much all of us. Yes, it's "bikini-season", and in the few moments when women are not being exhorted to blast off our newly-exposed cellulite, the swelter equals street harassment paradise. To make it worse, ice cream, verboten by conventional diet wisdom, beckons around every corner.

Fortunately, for everything that makes us feel bad about ourselves, there's a piece of feminist literature to help remind us that the beauty culture does not evaluate one individual's relative worthiness, but rather acts as a system that afflicts and controls women as a group."