Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped.
What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her...
The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.
The beauty myth generates low self-esteem for women and high profits for corporations as a result.
Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them vital lies, and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way...
Porn, it turns out, eventually takes the sexiness - that is, the wildness - out of sex.
Porn puts people to sleep, conceptually and politically as well as erotically.
Let me use a second metaphor. Imagine that you found a tangle of seaweed on the edge of the shore and lifted it. The heaviest parts rest on the sand in a mesh, but some skeins extend vertically. This...
It is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the myth, one woman's body is used to hurt another. Our faces and bodies become instruments for punishing other women, often used out of our...
Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn’t care about women’s appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to l...
What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.
Very nearly released by the spread of contraception, legal abortion, and the demise of the sexual double standard, that sexuality was quickly restrained once again by the new social forces of beauty p...
She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.
Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see,...
Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.
Sexual response is connected to and in turn generates a larger sense of pleasure, meaning, and interest in the world,
Women's flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.
Women will be free of the beauty myth when we can choose to use our faces and clothes and bodies as simply one form of self-expression out of a full range of others. We can dress up for our pleasure,...
When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women's faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? When someone discusses...
Todos os sistemas de trabalho que dependem da coação de uma mão de obra, forçando-a a aceitar condições más e remuneração injusta, reconheceram a eficácia de manter essa mão de obra exausta para imped...