318 Quotes About Body-image

Remember that our default ways of seeing are not natural or necessary. Any statue in any gallery testifies that we did not always think lean teens were the peak of beauty. Seeing is tangled up with belief; don’t let either be handed to you by juvenile men in boardrooms who want to take your money.

Lines can be the etchings of your biggest smiles, the frowns you learned from, the proof that you change and grow.

Focus on the parts of yourself that will not diminish with time – humour and wisdom are not like collagen. You will make more of them as you age.

You see Viola, this is the body I have and I'm gonna keep it. I've got a potato nose, a bit of flab, a muffin top... I've grown attached to them. And life's too short to worry about what other people think. I've decided to like myself the way I am and to have fun, every time I can.

It is considered normal for women and girls in the United States to have hair, a reality shaped to varying degrees by the default of Westernized beauty standards. In Western societies hair is often tied to notions of femininity, beauty and gender. Having hair is what is expected of a "normal" woman or girl. Of course, there is an endless screed of rules governing our notions of normal hair. One cannot have too much hair or too little.

...there are TONS of women who look like me but rarely did I see my body type represented in the media — and that lack of representation distorted the way I perceived my own beauty.

My dad will win, I silently countered, even as I smiled sweetly. I couldn’t wait to spike the ball right through her block, no matter how tall she was. In health class we’d learned that if Barbie were human, she’d be six feet tall and weigh one hundred pounds, and Gisele seemed pretty close to those dimensions. By contrast, my doll representation would be more like Barbie’s Fat Mexican-American Republican sidekick.

Serena’s body isn’t built to emulate the look of the model in an Ann Taylor shift dress. It’s built – through an exacting and grueling regimen – to decimate her opponents. And his suggestion that the body, too, is beautiful and sexy – in spite of, or even because of, its threat to the norms of white femininity – will continue to be threatening until the standards of beauty are decentered from those of the white upper class.

Somehow her getting naked breaks the tension. Her transformation is palpable: She seems easier, more confident; her body is how she asserts control.