8 quotes
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.
The Beauty Myth (1991)
What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.
The Beauty Myth (1991)
Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.
The Beauty Myth (1991)
You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.
The Beauty Myth (1991)
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 (1991)
The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her 'beauty.' Her reproductive value, as the 'aesthetic' value of her face and body today, 'came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race.'
The Beauty Myth (1991)
To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women.
The Beauty Myth (1991)
What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
The Beauty Myth (1991)