Even though I'm appalled when racism surfaces, and I personally don't agree with certain policy solutions and a lot of what they believe in, as someone who is very concerned about reinvigorating democracy the Tea Parties are an answer to what I asked for.

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

The Tea Party is not monolithic. There is a battle between people who care about liberty and the Constitution and the Republican Establishment who is trying to take ownership of it and redirect it for its own purposes.

Women who are beautiful or who achieve beauty according to the imposed standards are rewarded; those who cannot or choose not to be beautiful are punished, economically and socially.

The media needs to tell a story. And whenever there's a new generation, you know, with a new conversation, it's handy to say well, these are the angry young men, these are the hippies, these are the boomers.

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.

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.