Porn puts people to sleep, conceptually and politically as well as erotically.
Sexual response is connected to and in turn generates a larger sense of pleasure, meaning, and interest in the world,
You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that a woman is healthy if she lives to grow old; a...
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...
We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and r...
Only then will women be able to talk about what beauty really involves: the attention of people we do not know, rewards for things we did not earn, sex from men who reach for us as for a brass ring on...
Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and beautiful) stone women.
For any one woman to outgrow the myth, she needs the support of many women. The toughest but most necessary change will come not from men or from the media, but from women, in the way we see and behav...
A man’s right to confer judgment on any woman’s beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given.
I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes economic pressure and even legal judgments regarding...
The central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.
Women’s writing is full ... of heartbreak with the injustices done by beauty—its presence as well as its absence.
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 a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For ma...
There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy...
The sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, including advocates for 'adult' material such as Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein, represented porn to us as a great social radicalizer. But a nation of masturbati...
Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain's question: Is it safe here?
If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a self-denying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round...
Come incominciare? Dobbiamo essere sfrontate e avide. Inseguire il piacere. Evitare il dolore. Indossare, toccare, mangiare e bere quello che ci fa piacere. Tollerare le scelte delle altre donne. Rice...
Babies, I speculated in that peculiar mystical state, are sort of leaky little understudies for God. With each baby the human species gets the chance to break out of the self into the service of somet...