Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

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.

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

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

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.