Evolutionary biology is crazy because sometimes it seems anybody can draw any conclusion they want.

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

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

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.

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.

At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition