We are in the midst of a violent backlash againist feminism that uses images of female beauty as political weapons against women's advancement.

I met Muslim immigrants in Brooklyn who were swept up in 9-11 raids, held in abusive conditions, beaten, denied rights. That's how things started in Germany. Guantanamo was modeled after what Stalin developed for the Gulag.

It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.

When people get this consciousness of the way things are supposed to be in America - that the locus of agency is in them, that they are supposed to be the ones setting the agenda - if people believe this, they get very energized. Yeah, it's annoying to have this extra burden of saving the country.

No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

With the Internet there is even more fractioning since we are in echo chambers. With so much propaganda it is hard to calm down enough to listen.

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