All labor systems that depend on coercing a work force into accepting bad conditions and unfair compensation have recognized the effectiveness of keeping that work force exhausted to keep it from maki...
A woman enters a department store from the street, looking no doubt very mortal, her hair windblown, her own face visible. To reach the cosmetics counter, she must pass a deliberately disorienting pri...
The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem...
Only God, my dear, wrote Yeats blithely, Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair. This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines.
O mito da beleza gera nas mulheres uma redução de amor-próprio, com o resultado de altos lucros para as empresas.
Housework’s modern status, writes Ann Oakley, is nonwork. A recent study shows that if housework done by married women were paid, family income would rise by 60 percent. Housework totals forty billion...
Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.
By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value system...
Among the many incredible things about your incredible pelvic nerve and its lovely multiple branches is that, as we saw, it is completely unique for every individual woman on earth—no two women are al...
Ads do not sell sex—that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fict...
It is not surprising that in the female narrative [of schizophrenics] the hectoring spirit…who jeers, judges, commands and controls…is almost invariably male. He delivers the running critique of appea...
Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies.
Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intac...
We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social re...
Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth t...
Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing of the older rich men with young, beautiful women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominate...
Little girls for lack of anything better learn from what comes to hand. They do not lack facts; they lack a positive sexual culture: novels and poetry, film and jokes and rock and roll, written not to...
If a woman’s sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she doe...
I thought of how many women told me dispiritedly about how their husbands waited for them to ask—or to make a list—and how demoralizing that was for them. I could not help thinking that there was some...