Body Shots is a highly readable, very engaging, highly recommended thoughtful and thought-provoking start to what can hopefully become a lifelong journey towards media literacy and critical thought. It uses movies that you are generally quite familiar with and can easily relate to, and it gave me an important place to start in trying to further my own awareness of the media and the mixed messages that it sends. Personally, it has always been a bit of battle between what I intellectually comprehend in terms of the thin ideal and the dangers of eating disorders and the emotional impact popular media and its glamorized images have on me. Reading Body Shots was an empowering experience that really opened my eyes to the idea that I already possess many of the tools necessary to protect myself from the seductive power of the media. A while after I read Body Shots, while I watched one of Hollywood's typical chick-flicks, I found myself attuned to the artifice of the glamorized portrayal of the movie's female leads and began to feel the power and pleasure that Prof. Fox-Kales describes in her book that comes with the development of what bell hooks called the oppositional gaze. It allowed me to re-direct my previous focus on the star's bodies from admiration and envy to critical analysis, looking not just at the seductive images but asking why they were so, looking for the tools and technical effects employed. Having struggled with my own eating disordered behavior some years ago, I have often been overly sensitive to the visual images that promote the thin ideal even when the plot has nothing to do with this, but this time, I found how I could use that over-sensitivity in a way that empowered me, developing my critical lens instead of putting me down. I could approach the movie with tools that I already had before, and use the frameworks that Body Shots provides to re-create my own viewing experience. Body Shots greatest impact for me was how it showed me how many of the tools that I need to override the seductive allure of Hollywood are already in my toolkit. Finding this has certainly made me feel less vulnerable to the pull of Hollywood, and hopeful that from now on, my intellectual critical analysis will kick in with even more strength to protect me.