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

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

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

I've never understood this puritanical idea that feminism has to be a cult. You know, we all have to think alike or dress alike or have a similar ideology.

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

The '60s and '70s - I grew up in the Haight-Ashbury - people around me were going to school by day and all night long having these incredibly exciting meetings, mobilizing, marching, drafting statements. It was very intoxicating. It was very energizing. We've really forgotten a lot of those skills. Or they haven't been transmitted. It's useful to the people controlling us to have those skills not be available.

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.