After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.

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

If the whole world is a battlefield, then the United States is also a battlefield.

Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop.

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

When I went on Fox News people asked me why I was going on those shows. Are you kidding? You have to go, especially to people you don't agree with.

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.