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

If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen.

How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America, that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?

Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.