...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.

Of course a woman who decides to work full time as a mother in the home can be happy and deserves full respect from us. Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do. The goal is to remake the world so that our choices are not so stark.

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

If the whole world is a battlefield, then the United States is also a battlefield.

When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war.