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....

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.

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...