While we cannot directly affect the images, we can drain them of their power. We can turn away from them, look directly at one another, and find alternative images of beauty in a female subculture; se...
The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, whi...
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...
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.
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...
The soulless blood-rush of synthesized climax over a repetitive backbeat made disco the perfect music by which to score with a stranger.
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.
Let's be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women's choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the...
In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the tw...
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...
Barbie taught us a lot—sometimes more than we wanted to know. Her posture showed us that being sexual meant being immobile. It meant: walk on your toes, bust out, limbs rigid. Barbie would flash the w...
Women are told for so long that our feelings—our internal sensations of pain, pleasure, joy, sadness, or anger—are too much, or wrong, or bad. So eventually we can’t stop thinking and thinking about t...
Women are mere beauties in men’s culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.
The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or...
The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and n...
Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about beauty date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.
Even Barbie has been redesigned with a more realistic body type and now comes in many colors. Looking around, there is a bit more room today to be oneself.
But these facts are not very useful to women, because there is a double standard for health in men and women. Women are not getting it wrong when they smoke to lose weight. Our society does reward bea...
An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that justify the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beaut...