pornography

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
f99788f	Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested--as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. He was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography.	humour pornography sarcasm	Agatha Christie
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
470b646	A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having 'higher purposes.' A terrorist is a pornographer.	violence means-and-ends pornographer terrorist pornography	John Irving
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
29e6ecd	Women are not wrong if they react instinctively - often jealously - against their partner's interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman's destructive rival for her man's sexual capabilities.	pornography sexuality	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
130dfa3	"I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, "This medium is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything."	integrity shakespeare bravery courage beautiful-losers fresh-ideas great-art lars-von-trier porn-as-art sasha-grey sex-in-cinema struggling-artist struggling-writer refinement the-truth hip-hop courage-to-be-oneself modern-art vulgarity innovation pornography greatness	Raymond Chandler
6a68dd2	Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.	boredom internet-addiction distraction pornography internet	Alain de Botton
5d134f0	Prostitution, perversion, and pornography are intertwined with independence and radical politics in the history of outstanding women. Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Anais Nin, Kate Millett, Erica Jong--all of these women used the money they made from writing about sexuality to make it possible for them to live as rebels, dykes, feminists, artists, or whatever deviant and defiant identities they assumed.	sex pornography	Pat Califia
b4ea248	Since Thami had the Arab's utter incomprehension of the meaning of pornography, he imagined that the police had placed the ban on obscene films because these infringed upon Christian doctrine at certain specific points, in which case any Christian might be expected to show interest, if only to disapprove.	pornography	Paul Bowles
8aa30c7	... what I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.	sex the-zoo-story pornography	Edward Albee
1b2d50c	One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total PROFANATION: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely from the realm of intrinsic values. It involves wiping out one area in which the idea of the beautiful had taken root, so as to protect ourselves from the possibility of love it and therefore losing it.	profanation pornography	Roger Scruton

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

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

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

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

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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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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

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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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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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"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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"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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"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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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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Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested--as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. He was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography.

humour pornography sarcasm

Agatha Christie

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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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A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having 'higher purposes.' A terrorist is a pornographer.

violence means-and-ends pornographer terrorist pornography

John Irving

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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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Women are not wrong if they react instinctively - often jealously - against their partner's interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman's destructive rival for her man's sexual capabilities.

pornography sexuality

Naomi Wolf

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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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"I believe...that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over; he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men thought them incapable of. Alive today he would undoubtedly have written and directed motion pictures, plays, and God knows what. Instead of saying, "This medium is not good," he would have used it and made it good. If some people called some his work cheap (which some of it was), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, and he was too tough to shrink from anything."

integrity shakespeare bravery courage beautiful-losers fresh-ideas great-art lars-von-trier porn-as-art sasha-grey sex-in-cinema struggling-artist struggling-writer refinement the-truth hip-hop courage-to-be-oneself modern-art vulgarity innovation pornography greatness

Raymond Chandler

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Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.

boredom internet-addiction distraction pornography internet

Alain de Botton

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Prostitution, perversion, and pornography are intertwined with independence and radical politics in the history of outstanding women. Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Anais Nin, Kate Millett, Erica Jong--all of these women used the money they made from writing about sexuality to make it possible for them to live as rebels, dykes, feminists, artists, or whatever deviant and defiant identities they assumed.

sex pornography

Pat Califia

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Since Thami had the Arab's utter incomprehension of the meaning of pornography, he imagined that the police had placed the ban on obscene films because these infringed upon Christian doctrine at certain specific points, in which case any Christian might be expected to show interest, if only to disapprove.

pornography

Paul Bowles

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... what I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

sex the-zoo-story pornography

Edward Albee

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One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total PROFANATION: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely from the realm of intrinsic values. It involves wiping out one area in which the idea of the beautiful had taken root, so as to protect ourselves from the possibility of love it and therefore losing it.

profanation pornography

Roger Scruton