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

Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.

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

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

Maybe the less pain we inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us

Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.