Quotes & Sayings About Society And Body Image

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation
latent fears that we might be going too far. — Naomi Wolf

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. — Naomi Wolf

That's sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something ... real." Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. "Real love, real friends, real body parts ... — Jess C. Scott

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate. — Naomi Wolf

[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don't exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, 'retouching artists' conspire to 'help' beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman's 60 year old face looks like in print because it's made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they're comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine. — Dalma Heyn

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women. — Naomi Wolf

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large. — Padma Lakshmi

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken. — Naomi Wolf

Sometimes you need a reminder that negative comments about your body aren't even really about your body, they're about society and our society's wrongheaded and impossibly narrow definition of a "good" body. Your body didn't do anything wrong. What's fucked up about your body is not your body at all, but that your body has to live in a society that thinks it has a right to say fucked up things about your body. — Golda Poretsky

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

As a society, we need to get lots more flexible about what constitutes beauty. It isn't a particular hair color or a particular body type; it's the woman who grew the hair and lives in the body. Keeping this in mind can only make things better. (341) — Victoria Moran

The human body is always treated as an image of society. — Mary Douglas

Eating is not a crime. It's not a moral issue. It's normal. It's enjoyable. It just is. — Carrie Arnold

Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images. — Cheri K. Erdman

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight. — Naomi Wolf

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. — Naomi Wolf

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful. — Germaine Greer

It's my choice to be beautiful. It's my choice to be ugly. And it's my choice to decided what those words actually mean. — Virginia Petrucci

Wellbeing is all about balance. Unfortunately, the normal modern lifestyle (which actually isn't normal at all) often pushes us away from what's healthy and manageable, and prompts us to make decisions that overload our bodies and minds. As a society, we are just too busy, too stressed, too consumed with so-called success, too worried about our looks and our image, and not plugged in at all to our spiritual and emotional roots. — Susan Barbara Apollon

Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. — Naomi Wolf

Don't change your body to get respect from society. Instead let's change society to respect our bodies. — Golda Poretsky

Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with "good" bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go "bad", and those with "bad" bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have "good" bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle. — Golda Poretsky

Healthy emotions come in all sizes. Healthy minds come in all sizes. And healthy bodies come in all sizes. — Cheri K. Erdman

Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating. — Helen Brown