I’m a short woman with a pretty good body and large breasts — that’s not what I think of as sexy.

How stupid that all I have to dois grow two squishy lumps and suddenlyI’m man’s best friend

We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating...

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

Aging in women is ‘unbeautiful’ since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.

I’d learned to avoid mirrors. They never seemed to show me what I wanted to see.

May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.

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...

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

I have a body, but I am not my body.I have a face, but I am not my face.

The good news is that there is one kind of food you can never have too much of. The best way to fully recover from a food addiction or body-image problem is to fill up...

What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she...

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...

Only on a few occasions had I ever been comfortable showing my body off, and now here I was, taking a job where Asian boobs and ass ran free.

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.

If you find the dividing line between fairy tales and reality, let me know. In my mind, the two run together, even though the intersections aren’t always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or...

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted...

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it.

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

We can only bring about change in our lives when we clearly see two truths: that the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of fighting our toughest battles, and that by...

I’m sorry I don’t conform to your standards of feminine perfection, but I’m quite happy the way I am—anyway, I wasn’t born to be buxom.

What is this food in my head, anyway? Let’s see…it’s green and good for you and so delicious. It’s prepared by angels with love. The minute you bite into it, it’s savory, chewy, nourishing, and...

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....

I am protective of the gentle slope of stomach bulging like an early pregnancy, at my waist. I’ve earned its existence with everything I’ve been forced to swallow.

Inspiring qualities make some people to feel a little uneasy.

I can see that.

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

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...

Our culture is obsessed with perfection, especially when it comes to the way women look. The parameters of acceptability as far as physical appearance go are so limiting that only a handful of women actually...

I am, for some reason, actually happy with who I am and the muscle, the bones, and the flub that exist beneath these clothes.I don’t need to lose 20 lbs. to be attractive.I don’t need...

When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the...

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories,...

No matter what a woman’s appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize – as her personal problem – observations she makes about the beauty myth...

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market...

We may not be able to control life’s circumstances, but we always have a choice about how we use our minds to respond to them.

Choose this life. Choose this body. Say yes to all of it. Say yes to the beauty and the good and the ugly and the difficult. Choose what you have, what you are. Choose this...

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...

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language,...

Your lowest moment and life can be your best if you survive it and learn from it

Beauty shouldn’t be about changing yourself to achieve an ideal or be more socially acceptable. Real beauty, the interesting, truly pleasing kind, is about honoring the beauty within you and without you. It’s about knowing...

The human body is the best work of art.

Whatever is deeply, essentially female–the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin–is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease....

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is...

It’s my choice to be beautiful. It’s my choice to be ugly. And it’s my choice to decided what those words actually mean.

The skinnier and more toned I got, the fatter I felt.The more in shape I got, the more out of shape I felt like I was.And the more I made myself look good to the...

You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and...

Value yourself for what the media doesn’t – your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it’s not just valuing yourself for your ability to...

Health makes good propaganda.

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their...

Believe it or not, your body has nothing but unconditional love for you. The proof? Without any effort on your part, your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, and the rhythm of life is...