Anorexics are sure they are embarked on a quest that no one else can understand by looking at them. Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.
Something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.
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 vulva, clitoris, and vagina are actually best understood as the surface of an ocean that is shot through with vibrant networks of underwater lightning—intricate and fragile, individually varied ne...
The soulless blood-rush of synthesized climax over a repetitive backbeat made disco the perfect music by which to score with a stranger.
Os homens são estimulados visualmente pelo corpo feminino e são menos impressionáveis pela personalidade da mulher porque desde cedo são treinados para reagir assim, enquanto as mulheres são menos est...
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.
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...
Images of strangled women, women in cages do not push any limits; they are a mainstream cliche of a mainstream social order. Rock music fails to live up to its subversive tradition when it eroticizes...
From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and communist academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation’s premier artis...
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.
Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies.