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

Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

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.

Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.

I don't think we've got the concept in the West that male desire degrades men. Or that if men become sexually active, they become debased in some way, or slutty. Or lose status.