Quotes About Beauty

Women's writing is full ... with the injustices done by beauty—its presence as well as its absence.

The beauty myth generates low self-esteem for women and high profits for corporations as a result.

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.

Women's flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.

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.

They are able to welcome, then, a scenario in which "Good and Evil meet in ultimate battle." The barrage of beauty pornography joins with recent social upheavals to constitute an entirely new, chaotic, and disorienting environment; the food self-denial most women undergo is a form of sensory deprivation. So good and evil become thin and fat, fighting for the woman's soul.

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.

Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the West's controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret "underlife" poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.

We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement: the beauty myth.

It is dead easy to become an anorexic.

We learned the truth at seventeen," mourned a song that was popular that year, "that love was meant for beauty queens.

In our interpretation of the damages done by the beauty myth, it is not yet possible to lay blame anywhere but on oneself. I can say finally, for myself at least: at thirteen, to starve half to death? Not guilty. Not that child. There is certainly a charge of guilt to be made, long overdue. But it doesn't belong to me. It belongs somewhere, and to something, else.

The job market refined the beauty myth as a way to legitimize employment discrimination against women.

For women to be urged to think continually of beauty's fragility and transience is a way to try to keep us subservient, by maintaining in us a fatalism that has not been part of Western men's thinking since the Renaissance.

Throughout the decade, as money's ability to buy time for comfort and leisure was abandoned in the stratospheric pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake, the competition for beauty saw a parallel inflation: the material pleasures once presented as its goals—sex, love, intimacy, self expression—were lost in a desperate struggle within a sealed economy, becoming distant and quaint memories.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us.

at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women's intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood.

The most emblematic working women in the West could be visible if they were "beautiful," even if they were bad at their work; they could be good at their work and "beautiful" and therefore visible, but get no credit for merit; or they could be good and "unbeautiful" and therefore invisible, so their merit did them no good.

An employer can't prove an employee incompetent simply by announcing that she is. But because "beauty" lives so deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her feel ugly, act ugly, and, as far as her experience is concerned, be ugly, in the place where feeling beautiful keeps her whole.

It is inconceivable to the dominant culture that it should respect as a political allegiance, as deep as any ethnic or racial pride, a woman's determination to show her loyalty—in the face of a beauty myth as powerful as myths about white supremacy—to her age, her shape, her self, her life.

But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness us not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural cixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

The ideology of beauty] has grown strong to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.

Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped.

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.