The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.

Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights.

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

What editors are obliged to appear to say that.

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.

Advertisers are the West’s courteous censors.

Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.

The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.

The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.

Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance.