aging

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
8f4c56e	Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
3b647e7	These fragments I have shored against my ruins	past fall aging nostalgia	T.S. Eliot
32ce2ff	Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.	rape equality feminism beauty harassment sexual-harassment body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography law society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
adb17ef	"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 that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
27afe35	Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.	activist beautiful-personatlity beautiful-soul fathers giving-heart helping-out homeless-tent-community jealousy marine-life-conservation medical-missions motivators openess outward-beauty people-of-action real-people rescuers search-and-rescue time true-beauty prayer writing compassion inspiration philosophy truth inspirational empathetic takers communicators perspectives inner-beauty tender givers loving charity mothers community friendships service reflection judgement vanity aging	Shannon L. Alder
5b24af7	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 body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women insatiable. We greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics self-love images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
13639d3	And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.	time life aging	Martin Amis
c2cdfc0	The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
b380f52	"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. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. 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-- women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life show on her face?"	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
319c5c6	"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, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart."	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
b9cb5e7	"The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
155cc2e	"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 is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first."	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
4ac3445	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. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
dc6c4b5	Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
2c8b53a	What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
aef238b	"Our society 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 the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]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."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
63bdec2	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 has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
0c0c763	I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...	reading death old-age aging	Edward Gorey
f70e0da	Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me . It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.	life maturing getting-older contentment experience aging	Anne Lamott
450bfe8	What editors are obliged to appear to say that want from women is actually what their want from women.	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing conformity pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
845cbfd	"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 it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence "You're beautiful," which is next to "I love you" in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is to be unhappy. And the "luckiest" woman of all, told she is loved because she's "beautiful," is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
c61f258	Health makes good propaganda.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards health propaganda magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
9775c3e	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 pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar---who hands him the paper every morning.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
2fffa35	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 operable condition.	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
20f423e	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 complete.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
e98426b	"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 believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill."	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
5f1d622	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.	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
f21dbf5	"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 reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
378d0ee	Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.	handsomeness visibility aging	Orhan Pamuk
f9090c3	"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 of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!"	equality feminism beauty dieting body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
dbba160	"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."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
544bdf3	"She may resent 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: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful."	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
dd29c7d	You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five.	life inspirational reflections aging	Mitch Albom
f1632f7	"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-- women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic show on her body, and how much of a female life show on her face?"	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
2f45c1b	"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 true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention."	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
0020224	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 did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
1795576	"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 is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. 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 believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill."	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
e989235	The important part of growing older was the growing part. Resisting change meant forever standing still, which was a sad way to live.	change blueprints growing-older aging	Barbara Delinsky
f67b906	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 is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
1bc531c	"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 illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year." --	equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
00c53ae	"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." That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or . 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 is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
a4b2144	I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don't love--until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach--but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it's such a blessing that I'm not left to my own devices.	women grace aging	Anne Lamott
2ef8f8c	"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."	equality feminism beauty body-image diets sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
67bfba9	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 advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging	Naomi Wolf
2da0e11	Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.	time life midlife-crisis ageing old aging	Philip K. Dick
6b11c26	So where does that leave me? I like hosting the show....It's become my identity. If that's gone, where am I?	women discrimination job workplace aging	Barbara Delinsky
ac5c969	It's very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.	tuesdays-with-morrie mitch-albom inspirational growth aging	Mitch Albom
a937eac	Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.	elders listen-to-your-elders observations-on-life teenagers aging	Aimee Bender
5fb712a	There are various theories about why the years seem to pass faster as you get older. The most popular is also the most obvious. As you get older, each year is a smaller percentage of your life. If you are ten years old, a year is ten percent. If you are fifty years old, a year is two percent. But she read a theory that spurned that explanation. The theory states that time passes faster when we are in a set routine, when we aren't learning anything new, when we stay stuck in a life pattern. They key to making time slow down is to have new experiences. You may joke that the week you went on vacation flew by far too quickly, but if you stop and think about it, that week actually seemed to last much longer than one involving the drudgery of your day job. You are complaining about it going away so fast because you loved it, not because it felt as though time was passing faster. If you want to slow down time, this theory holds: If you want to make the days last, do something different. Travel to exotic locales. Take a class.	time aging	Harlan Coben
9c59170	"You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day." "You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens." "Then what happens?" "You won't be able to find the treasure." "Will I be too old to look for it?" "No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place." --	youth treasure growing-up aging	Jeanette Winterson
ba8db87	I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past ought to have been it was.	aging	Gore Vidal
67b225f	...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?	mortality death philosophy libanius philosophy-of-death aging	Gore Vidal
9b7ed25	I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn't interested in a little black girl's dreams.	youth dreams hope anger pity aging	Jeanette Winterson

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

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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These fragments I have shored against my ruins

past fall aging nostalgia

T.S. Eliot

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

rape equality feminism beauty harassment sexual-harassment body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography law society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together."

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.

activist beautiful-personatlity beautiful-soul fathers giving-heart helping-out homeless-tent-community jealousy marine-life-conservation medical-missions motivators openess outward-beauty people-of-action real-people rescuers search-and-rescue time true-beauty prayer writing compassion inspiration philosophy truth inspirational empathetic takers communicators perspectives inner-beauty tender givers loving charity mothers community friendships service reflection judgement vanity aging

Shannon L. Alder

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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 body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women insatiable. We greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics self-love images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

time life aging

Martin Amis

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

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. 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-- women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life show on her face?"

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart."

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty."

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first."

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"Our society 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 the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]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."

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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 has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...

reading death old-age aging

Edward Gorey

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Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it has given me . It has provided time and experience and failures and triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that was waiting for me. I fit into me now. I have an organic life, finally, not necessarily the one people imagined for me, or tried to get me to have. I have the life I longed for. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I would be.

life maturing getting-older contentment experience aging

Anne Lamott

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

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing conformity pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence "You're beautiful," which is next to "I love you" in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is to be unhappy. And the "luckiest" woman of all, told she is loved because she's "beautiful," is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is."

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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Health makes good propaganda.

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards health propaganda magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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 pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar---who hands him the paper every morning.

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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 operable condition.

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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 complete.

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill."

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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.

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth."

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

handsomeness visibility aging

Orhan Pamuk

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"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 of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!"

equality feminism beauty dieting body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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."

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"She may resent 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: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful."

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five.

life inspirational reflections aging

Mitch Albom

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"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-- women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic show on her body, and how much of a female life show on her face?"

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention."

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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 did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. 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 believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill."

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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The important part of growing older was the growing part. Resisting change meant forever standing still, which was a sad way to live.

change blueprints growing-older aging

Barbara Delinsky

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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 is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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 illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year." --

equality feminism beauty body-image sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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"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." That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or . 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 is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first."

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don't love--until a few years ago, I had no idea that you could have cellulite on your stomach--but not only do I get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory? You bet I would. That is why it's such a blessing that I'm not left to my own devices.

women grace aging

Anne Lamott

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"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."

equality feminism beauty body-image diets sexual-violence cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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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 advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry fashion-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality eating-disorders self-esteem aging

Naomi Wolf

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Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.

time life midlife-crisis ageing old aging

Philip K. Dick

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So where does that leave me? I like hosting the show....It's become my identity. If that's gone, where am I?

women discrimination job workplace aging

Barbara Delinsky

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It's very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.

tuesdays-with-morrie mitch-albom inspirational growth aging

Mitch Albom

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Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.

elders listen-to-your-elders observations-on-life teenagers aging

Aimee Bender

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There are various theories about why the years seem to pass faster as you get older. The most popular is also the most obvious. As you get older, each year is a smaller percentage of your life. If you are ten years old, a year is ten percent. If you are fifty years old, a year is two percent. But she read a theory that spurned that explanation. The theory states that time passes faster when we are in a set routine, when we aren't learning anything new, when we stay stuck in a life pattern. They key to making time slow down is to have new experiences. You may joke that the week you went on vacation flew by far too quickly, but if you stop and think about it, that week actually seemed to last much longer than one involving the drudgery of your day job. You are complaining about it going away so fast because you loved it, not because it felt as though time was passing faster. If you want to slow down time, this theory holds: If you want to make the days last, do something different. Travel to exotic locales. Take a class.

time aging

Harlan Coben

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"You are young," said my father. "You won't get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day." "You'll get older," said my mother, "that's what happens." "Then what happens?" "You won't be able to find the treasure." "Will I be too old to look for it?" "No, but you'll be looking in the wrong place." --

youth treasure growing-up aging

Jeanette Winterson

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I am afraid that as people grow old there is a tendency for them to believe that what the past *ought* to have been it was.

aging

Gore Vidal

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...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?

mortality death philosophy libanius philosophy-of-death aging

Gore Vidal

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I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn't interested in a little black girl's dreams.

youth dreams hope anger pity aging

Jeanette Winterson