Take responsibility for your children. I'm 22 and neither unhealthy or fixated on maintaining a "goal weight." Why? Because I was raised in a house where children were expected to run around outside and eat child size portions. I was also raised to believe that obsession and loathing about your own body is a bad way to deal with confusion about your external life. "Obesity crisis" my ass. Take your kid on a walk!

People are so retarded.

Could someone please shed some light on something for me? How does your captor deciding not to kill you make you a hero? Doesn't it just make you lucky?

Wasn't the whole point of the last 8 years that by handing our government to "Christian" leaders? That worked out so well. Obviously, everything can be blamed on America's rampant witch curse problem.

I'm pretty sure vice would make no distiction between what Melissa does and the runaway girl on the street corner do. But, I really don't care whatever arrangements are made between two consenting unmarried adults. What really disturbs me about this story is the fact that there are men using their low/mid level positions in HR to pressure/entice job seekers into private prostitution! I hope this is just an example of one person trending. If I had gone to an interview and heard that my "skills" were more suited to fucking for shoes I would have immediately called my lawyer and taken HIS job.

Um, why are people not absolutely livid at the journalistic irresponsibility of the NYT to employ a writer who did not understand what he was covering? At Edmund Andrews for maintaining his charade?

I would just like to say that even as a 23 year old who has never had any debt or any education about finance, I knew something was fishy with the "storyline" even just from reading the extract in the review!

The shame is that someone who is not a selfish-manipulative-hack-moron could have written this book. It's timely, if not nessisary. He completely wasted publisher support, access to information, and the opportunity to actually help people figure out what happened/what will happen.

Just once I'd like to see a Woody Allen film where the young blonde is totally grossed out by the guy who's older than her grandfather scamming on her. Grandpa would then have to come to terms with the fact that all the young, intellectually inferior, blondes who have fallen for him before were just children who he manipulated. Then he dies alone. Just once.

Um, you seem to be forgetting something. Old people ARE icky.

Roseanne, the real person, may have had Hollywood people giving her grief about her weight, but for Roseanne, the television character, it was virtually a non-issue. If referenced at all it was in a joke that was obviously not particularly hurtful and framed usually in terms of her being working class, not a member of a unique social class of its own. My primary issue with the programming that is coming out now (primarily "Drop Dead Diva") is that it takes "being fat" a horrible, condition as a given. Furthermore, it makes the argument that being overweight is a DISABILITY. WTF.

I think I may have dropped a crucial verb in my first letter (Post-Oprah Effect). The point I was trying to make that it’s only been in the last 10-15 years or so that being fat has become so demonized. It’s a totally fabricated moral panic. If anyone has read Stanley Cohen's landmark sociological study "Folk Devils and Moral Panics" they know what I mean. While "being fat" has long been a negatively perceived trait it's only very very recently that it has transitioned into a supposed full blown attack on broader society. Meaning, people may have always had made their weight the focus of their own poor self-esteem, but it’s never been perceived as the sole defining trait of a person before. Furthermore, a defining trait that actually attacks or infects other people who are exposed to it. The point I was trying to make is that Roseanne may or may not have had issues getting work as an actress because of her weight, but if anything, for Roseanne the character, it just added to her credibility as a "normal person." Today, it would have signified her as a member of a ghettoized class solely defined by weight. For example, Drop Dead Diva: She’s fat, but she’s also a lawyer! Comedy ensues. I’m not even touching the body switch angle, Kate’s right, it’s just a standard storytelling convention. As a sociologist, I am morbidly fascinated by the comments made in response to anything even vaguely having to with weight sparks many responses of people volunteering their weight or size as though those numbers have universal "values" associated with them. I think it’s an extension of our brains natural need to create social order in a hierarchical form. We can’t define ourselves by color anymore, divine right of kings doesn’t hold up in court, so what do we have? It just so happens that we all really do have numbers attached to the seats of our pants. It’s only logical that people would begin to rank themselves in terms of those numbers. Logical, but totally crazy that is.

But seriously, I have a question.

Why does the systematic denial of rights and respect to others make some people feel good?

Anyone who sees devils everywhere they look is standing in a hall of mirrors.

This girl is in for a rude awakening. She obviously has no idea what the world is like right now. In a couple of years, if everything eventually balances out, this may be a valid concern. Right now the only question she should be asking herself is, "Where can I survive being unemployed or underemployed for at least a year?"