The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

From a constitutional point of view George W. Bush passing through the Patriot Act is no worse than Obama renewing it.

The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.

The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.

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 them.

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.

I did not imagine that pregnant women were 'naturally' any more sensitive or exalted than people in any other condition; only it seemed as if - perhaps because we are in such a twilight state, a melting down and reconstituting of the self - there was more opportunity to hear strains from what must be the other side, the moral music of the sphere.