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

Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.

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

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.

I'm not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your Greenwich Village apartment. I'm worried about things like the McCain Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time.

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.