A balanced dieT to make you die with a tea, consists of holding two bags of cookies on each hand and a voracious hunger to consume.

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...

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...

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...

Health makes good propaganda.

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 beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly...

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 attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children...

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....

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women’s bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman...

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...

Eating is not a crime. It’s not a moral issue. It’s normal. It’s enjoyable. It just is.

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...

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her “beauty.

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...

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...

She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex–or, if “beautiful,” her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac:...

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...

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...

Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They...

Healthy emotions come in all sizes. Healthy minds come in all sizes. And healthy bodies come in all sizes.

Healthy” and “diseased,” as Susan Sontag points out…are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

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,...

‘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.’...

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don’t do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped...

Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images.

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...

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...

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.

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

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

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...

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

The diet industry is making a lot of money selling us fad diets, nonfat foods full of chemicals, gym memberships, and pills while we lose a piece of our self-esteem every time we fail another...

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...

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...

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...

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty ‘fixes’ that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under...

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

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....

Men are visually aroused by women’s bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women’s personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because...

The surgeons’ market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

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

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...

A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own...

At least a third of a woman’s life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition–so that women will only feel...

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