No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.

The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.

I did not imagine that pregnant women were 'naturally' any more sensitive or exalted than people in any other condition; only it seemed as if - perhaps because we are in such a twilight state, a melting down and reconstituting of the self - there was more opportunity to hear strains from what must be the other side, the moral music of the sphere.

Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.