body-image

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
8689a84	There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.	be-yourself women beauty success happiness life inspirational comfortable imperfection body-image rare	Steve Maraboli
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
2c6057e	"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 her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem	Naomi Wolf
d874fc4	HO	perfection inspirational perfectionism body-image self-love eating-disorders	Ellen Hopkins
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
c97fcae	"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 has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive."	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem	Naomi Wolf
fa74a55	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 that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.	feminism women body-image	Zadie Smith
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
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
6f37aec	"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 desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why ? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?"	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	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
acc3482	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 should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.	equality feminism beauty body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem	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
88856fd	Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.	equality feminism beauty consumer body-image cosmetic-surgery diet-industry mass-culture objectification plastic-surgery cosmetics images marketing pornography society culture double-standards magazines sexuality self-esteem	Naomi Wolf
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
5129dbc	"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 current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice."	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 eating-disorders self-esteem	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
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
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
3a0ffc6	Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.	body-image society self-image self-esteem	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
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
ef917c5	As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.	beauty body-image marketing society self-esteem	Naomi Wolf
4b775ba	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 reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.	feminist body-image society	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
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
f3ac1cd	I have two wardrobes. One, the clothes I wear everyday, is made up mostly of dark denim jeans, black T-shirts, and, for special occasions, dress shirts. These clothes shroud my cowardice. These are the clothes I feel safe in. This is the armor I wear to face the world, and I assure you, armor is needed. I tell myself this armor is all I need. When I wear my typical uniform, it feels like safety, like I can hide in plain sight. I become less of a target. I am taking up space, but I am doing so in an unassuming manner so I am less of a problem, less of a disturbance. This is what I tell myself. My other wardrobe, the one that dominates most of my closet, is full of the clothes I don't have the courage to wear.	body-image clothes uniform fashion	Roxane Gay
8ce8366	Jack hit the floor and fired off push-ups until he thought he'd pass out. The spinning behind his eyes felt good. He'd gotten by with a half grapefruit (35 calories) at breakfast, because his mom was such an emotional wreck before driving him to the hospital. She didn't argue over the half cup of oatmeal (110 calories), which he dumped in the sink before polishing off the last of his red M&Ms, his go-to food when life got sucky.	body-image eating-disorders fat	Sherry Shahan

8689a84

There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.

be-yourself women beauty success happiness life inspirational comfortable imperfection body-image rare

Steve Maraboli

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

2c6057e

"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 her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him."

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

Naomi Wolf

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HO

perfection inspirational perfectionism body-image self-love eating-disorders

Ellen  Hopkins

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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

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

c97fcae

"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 has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive."

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

Naomi Wolf

fa74a55

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 that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

feminism women body-image

Zadie Smith

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

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

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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

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

6f37aec

"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 desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why ? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?"

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

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

acc3482

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 should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.

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

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

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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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Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

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

Naomi Wolf

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

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"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 current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice."

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 eating-disorders self-esteem

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

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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

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

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

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

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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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Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.

body-image society self-image self-esteem

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

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

ef917c5

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

beauty body-image marketing society self-esteem

Naomi Wolf

4b775ba

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 reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.

feminist body-image society

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

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

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I have two wardrobes. One, the clothes I wear everyday, is made up mostly of dark denim jeans, black T-shirts, and, for special occasions, dress shirts. These clothes shroud my cowardice. These are the clothes I feel safe in. This is the armor I wear to face the world, and I assure you, armor is needed. I tell myself this armor is all I need. When I wear my typical uniform, it feels like safety, like I can hide in plain sight. I become less of a target. I am taking up space, but I am doing so in an unassuming manner so I am less of a problem, less of a disturbance. This is what I tell myself. My other wardrobe, the one that dominates most of my closet, is full of the clothes I don't have the courage to wear.

body-image clothes uniform fashion

Roxane Gay

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Jack hit the floor and fired off push-ups until he thought he'd pass out. The spinning behind his eyes felt good. He'd gotten by with a half grapefruit (35 calories) at breakfast, because his mom was such an emotional wreck before driving him to the hospital. She didn't argue over the half cup of oatmeal (110 calories), which he dumped in the sink before polishing off the last of his red M&Ms, his go-to food when life got sucky.

body-image eating-disorders fat

Sherry Shahan