Right. I look fine. Except I don’t,’ said Zora, tugging sadly at her man’s nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self-disgust. To...

I’m not going to miss 95% of life to weigh 5% less.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because...

We survey lush landscapes with variations not dissimilar to a so-called “imperfect” female body with absolute pleasure — say, an expanse of Irish countryside with grassy rolling hills. But is it really so much uglier...

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...

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

You are a human being, not a human body.

Although contemplating the nature of the body highlights its less attractive features, the purpose of the exercise is not to demonize the body. While it is certainly true that at times the discourses describe the...

Cosmetic surgery is not “cosmetic,” and human flesh is not “plastic.” Even the names trivialize what it is. It’s not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the...

She was a tall woman with unfashionable hips and a long chestnut braid singing down her back.

For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

[Women’s magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look...

The articles were extremely eye-opening. Not just in Teen Vogue but in Seventeen and CosmoGirl as well. They were all about being yourself, staying natural, loving your body as is, and going green! The messages...

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,...

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...