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 systems...

Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not...

‘Never,’ enjoins a women’s magazine, ‘mention the size of his [penis] in public… and never, ever let him know that anyone else knows or you may find it shrivels up and disappears, serving you right.’...

She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.

Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our “beauty” so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and...

Health makes good propaganda.

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women’s identification with the issues. If the public...

has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior...

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it....

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate...

The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn’t do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross...

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes–all of which we do. The fact...

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us…During the past decade, women breached the power structure;...

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 rigor, and the...

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in...

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her “Health”: if public discourse were really concerned with women’s health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

As soon as a woman’s primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute...

Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The...

Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I...

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and...

Women are not wrong if they react instinctively – often jealously – against their partner’s interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman’s destructive rival for her man’s sexual capabilities.

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can’t relax to let...

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an...

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit,...

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never...

It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States…capable of maintaining the rule of democracy…. Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores…. I am convinced that...

Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why...

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women’s pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a...

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop…”an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution...

The mass depiction of the modern woman as a “beauty” is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, “beauty” is by definition inert, timeless, and...

The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because...

The surgeons are playing on the myth’s double standard for the function of the body. A man’s thigh is for walking, but a woman’s is for walking and looking “beautiful.” If women can walk but...

Here’s what we’re not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught...