At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

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

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.

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.

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.