To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

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.

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

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.

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.