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,...

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.

Being female in this world means having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body...

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...

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of “being,” my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just...

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...