Quotes About Women

Unfortunately, since the media routinely give accounts of women's appearance in a way that trivializes or discredits what they say, women reading or watching are routinely dissuaded from identifying with women in the public eye—the ultimate anti-feminist goal of the beauty myth.

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.

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.

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.

O mito da beleza gera nas mulheres uma redução de amor-próprio, com o resultado de altos lucros para as empresas.

Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are—less. We should identify it as Jews identify the death camps, as homosexuals identify AIDS: as a disgrace that is not our own, but that of an inhumane social order.

Men are only in sexual competition when they are competing sexually, but the myth puts women in "sexual" competition in every situation. Competition for a specific sexual partner is rare; since it is not usually a competition "for men," it is not biologically inevitable.

Since middle-class women have been sequestered from the world, isolated from one another, and their heritage submerged with each generation, they are more dependent than men are in the cultural models to offer, and more likely to be imprinted by them. [...] Given few role models in the world, women seek them on the screen and the glossy page.

The way to instill social values, writes historian Susan G. Cole, is to eroticize them. Images that turn women into objects or eroticize the degradation of women have arisen to counterbalance women's recent self-assertion. They are welcome and necessary because the sexes have come too close for the comfort of the powerful [...]

A girl learns that stories happen to beautiful women, whether they are interesting or not. And, interesting or not, stories do not happen to women who are not beautiful.

This ritual use of constant surveillance is a vivid example of the real motivation behind the myth: Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. 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.

None of this is true. "Beauty" is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.

This point, where beauty forms the bridge between women and institutions, is what women are taught to seize upon, and is then used as proof that women themselves are finally to blame. But to make herself grasp this straw, a woman has to surpress what she knows: that the powerful ask for women to display themselves in this way.

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.

Women's magazines for over a century have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women's roles, and throughout that time—today more than ever—they have consistently glamorized whatever the economy, their advertisers, and, during wartime, the government, needed at that time from women.

Though many women realized that their attention was being focused in this way, fewer fully understood how thoroughly politically such focusing works: In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly.

Thirty-five thousand dollars worth of advertising was withdrawn from a British magazine the day after an editor, Carol Sarler, was quoted as saying that she found it hard to show women looking intelligent when they were plastered in makeup.

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

The women streamed out of the auditorium with old or new friends, heading toward drinks or a nighttime walk, or to the Tube together, in the endlessly exciting, inviting city. I still have a picture from that last day of the old world.

Some men know that they are being influenced by the women of their choice—their wives, sweethearts, mothers, or sisters—but they tactfully refrain from rebelling against the influence because they are intelligent enough to know that no man is happy or complete without the modifying influence of the right woman. The man who does not recognize this important truth deprives himself of the power which has done more to help men achieve success than all other forces combined.

Many American women go without prenatal care during pregnancy, while expectant mothers in the Netherlands get free house calls from nurses.

To eliminate feeblemindedness, Goddard rejected the calls of people like McKim to kill the feebleminded. But he did want to make sure they didn't get to have children. And by "they," Goddard mostly meant women.

Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.