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8774df8
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All labor systems that depend on coercing a work force into accepting bad conditions and unfair compensation have recognized the effectiveness of keeping that work force exhausted to keep it from making trouble.
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Naomi Wolf |
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e0cc256
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Society really doesn't care about women's appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will "be good," but to make sure that they will know they are being watched."
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Naomi Wolf |
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8569737
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What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself fo..
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Naomi Wolf |
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2ae2273
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But these facts are not very useful to women, because there is a double standard for "health" in men and women. Women are not getting it wrong when they smoke to lose weight. Our society does 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 in..
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Naomi Wolf |
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7819738
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Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance.
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Naomi Wolf |
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f8e86d4
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Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and "beautiful") stone women."
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Naomi Wolf |
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00e4c42
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Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them "vital lies," and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: "The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format." The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are d..
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Naomi Wolf |
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1391426
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The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women's faces and bodies.
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Naomi Wolf |
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6fd2b9f
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Even Barbie has been redesigned with a more realistic body type and now comes in many colors. Looking around, there is a bit more room today to be oneself.
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Naomi Wolf |
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823a2cc
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Babies, I speculated in that peculiar mystical state, are sort of leaky little understudies for God. With each baby the human species gets the chance to break out of the self into the service of something so 'other' that the reasons for conditional love can give way to faith in unconditional love... with babies, we get the chance to take one manageable baby step on the long hard path of the saints.
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Naomi Wolf |
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f73fda2
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It is all impersonal; it is political.
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Naomi Wolf |
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2d55d42
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The problem with cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out exists only if women hate ourselves when we don't. When a woman is forced to adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming in order to protect her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must attract a lover so that she can take care of her children, that is exactly what makes 'bea..
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Naomi Wolf |
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fd1b134
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Come incominciare? Dobbiamo essere sfrontate e avide. Inseguire il piacere. Evitare il dolore. Indossare, toccare, mangiare e bere quello che ci fa piacere. Tollerare le scelte delle altre donne. Ricercare il sesso che vogliamo e combattere furiosamente contro quello che non vogliamo. Scegliere le nostre cause. E quando avremo infranto e cambiato le regole in modo che non venga scosso il nostro senso della nostra bellezza, canteremo questa ..
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Naomi Wolf |
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81d9820
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The vulva, clitoris, and vagina are actually best understood as the surface of an ocean that is shot through with vibrant networks of underwater lightning--intricate and fragile, individually varied neural pathways.
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Naomi Wolf |
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990cd48
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Are women beautiful or aren't we?
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females
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Naomi Wolf |
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c8145de
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Lad os vaere skamlose. Gradige. Opsoge fornojelser. Undga smerte. Klaede os, spise og drikke, som vi har lyst til. Vaere tolerante over for andre kvinders valg. Vaelge den form for sex, vi har lyst til og kaempe hardt mod den form for sex, vi ikke har lyst til. Finde vore egne grunde til at handle, som vi gor.
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Naomi Wolf |
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60d4dbf
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While we cannot directly affect the images, we can drain them of their power. We can turn away from them, look directly at one another, and find alternative images of beauty in a female subculture; seek out the plays, music, films that illuminate women in three dimensions; find the biographies of women, the women's history, the heroines that in each generation are submerged from view; fill in the terrible, 'beautiful' blanks. We can lift ou..
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Naomi Wolf |
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06bff83
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Beauty" is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman; the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts."
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beauty
western-ideals
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Naomi Wolf |
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cb5bd34
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Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing of the older rich men with young, "beautiful" women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E., the situation was reversed:"
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Naomi Wolf |
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391a975
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Obviamente sob o ponto de vista fisico os homens nao envelhecem melhor. Eles so envelhecem melhor em termos de seu status social. Esse nosso erro de percepcao deriva do fato de nossos olhos estarem treinados para ver o tempo no rosto das mulheres como um defeito enquanto no dos homens ele indica personalidade. Se a principal funcao deles fosse decorativa e a adolescencia masculina fosse considerada o apogeu de seu valor, a aparencia de um "..
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Naomi Wolf |
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c56a519
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The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance. Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have been "beautiful" in women since they stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. ..
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Naomi Wolf |
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cd8cc64
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Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about "beauty" date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented."
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Naomi Wolf |
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9044011
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This is not a conspiracy theory; it doesn't have to be. Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them "vital lies," and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: "The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format."..
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ibsen
vital-lies
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Naomi Wolf |
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d01c5c8
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A man's right to confer judgment on any woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given.
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Naomi Wolf |
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8e40a2a
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Of course, men don't age any better physically. They age better only in terms of social status. We misperceive in this way since our eyes are trained to see time as a flaw on women's faces where it is a mark of character on men's.
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Naomi Wolf |
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fdc9d43
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Let's say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn't even see, she falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable. He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut, weeping from a ..
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Naomi Wolf |
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4619358
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When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it.
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Naomi Wolf |
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2a5e408
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sexual response is connected to and in turn generates a larger sense of pleasure, meaning, and interest in the world,
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Naomi Wolf |
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f96fd98
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If a woman's sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer. It is hard, because of such conditioning, to envisage a female body free of pain and still desirable.
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Naomi Wolf |
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f653281
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Os homens sao estimulados visualmente pelo corpo feminino e sao menos impressionaveis pela personalidade da mulher porque desde cedo sao treinados para reagir assim, enquanto as mulheres sao menos estimuladas em termos visuais e mais em termos emocionais por ser este o treinamento que recebem.
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Naomi Wolf |
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a587d77
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Quando a romancista Margaret Atwood perguntou a mulheres o que elas mais temiam dos homens, elas responderam que tinham medo que eles as matassem. Quando fez a mesma pergunta aos homens com relacao as mulheres, eles responderam que tinham medo que elas rissem deles.
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Naomi Wolf |
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6c8d66a
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Barbie taught us a lot--sometimes more than we wanted to know. Her posture showed us that being sexual meant being immobile. It meant: walk on your toes, bust out, limbs rigid. Barbie would flash the white of her teeth, cock her head, swivel on her torso, half raise her smooth arm, but she could say nothing. For Barbie had no conceivable character or inner life. Barbie's breasts and clothes seemed to blunt her personality. In Barbie's life,..
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promiscuities
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Naomi Wolf |
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77ba9cf
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It is not surprising that in the female narrative [of schizophrenics] the hectoring spirit...who jeers, judges, commands and controls...is almost invariably male. He delivers the running critique of appearance and performance that the woman has grown up with as part of her stream of consciousness.
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Naomi Wolf |
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15ffcab
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A woman enters a department store from the street, looking no doubt very mortal, her hair windblown, her own face visible. To reach the cosmetics counter, she must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents that combine to submit her to the "sensory overload" used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility. On either side of her are ranks of angels--seraphim and cherubim--the "perfect" faces of the models..
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Naomi Wolf |
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084006c
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Anorexics are sure they are embarked on a quest that no one else can understand by looking at them. Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.
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Naomi Wolf |
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f6d7de6
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Religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man's sexual pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as the circumcision knife into a woman's enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might otherwise experience.
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Naomi Wolf |
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5b006bd
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The soulless blood-rush of synthesized climax over a repetitive backbeat made disco the perfect music by which to score with a stranger.
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Naomi Wolf |
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8ced81c
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Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped.
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Naomi Wolf |
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535dab8
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A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights.
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Naomi Wolf |
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2d51681
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The harm is apparent in the way such imagery represses female sexuality and lowers women's sexual self-esteem by casting sex as locked in a chastity belt to which "beauty" is the only key."
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Naomi Wolf |
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fb9faf2
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Little girls for lack of anything better learn from what comes to hand. They do not lack facts; they lack a positive sexual culture: novels and poetry, film and jokes and rock and roll, written not to sell but to explore and communicate and celebrate, as the best male erotic culture is written.
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Naomi Wolf |
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b387964
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If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a self-denying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round, men and women seated together; but the same traditional hierarchical dais, with a folding table for women at the foot.
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Naomi Wolf |
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92ec67d
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In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women's skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.
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Naomi Wolf |
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5556029
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As qualidades que um determinado periodo considera belas nas mulheres sao apenas simbolos do comportamento feminino que aquele periodo julga ser desejavel. O mito da beleza de fato sempre determina o comportamento, nao a aparencia. A competicao entre as mulheres foi incorporada ao mito para promover a divisao entre elas. A juventude e (ate recentemente) a virgindade sao "belas" nas mulheres por representarem a ignorancia sexual e a falta de..
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Naomi Wolf |