Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

Al Gore was a good guy and he wanted to give flextime to American women who are trying to balance work and family, but he couldn't because the business interests are organized, and they don't want it to happen.

Our culture is a capitalist society right? And so in order to always have the idea of the good life, means something you pay money for. Think of being outside of what you have and own, it always has to be receiving a difference.

It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.

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

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.