Body Image Quotes

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.

~ Naomi Wolf

For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms.

~ Anne Lamott

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

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male ideal from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.

~ Naomi Wolf

Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.

~ Naomi Wolf

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

~ Germaine Greer

Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.

~ 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

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

~ Naomi Wolf

Beauty and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be beautiful to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both beautiful and sexual constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.

~ Naomi Wolf

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning.

~ Naomi Wolf

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.

~ Naomi Wolf

Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop...an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual. A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. Beauty is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is beautiful. The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: I destroyed all my fat photographs!; It's a new me!

~ 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

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

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

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I'm really good looking. Then other times I think my body's all wrong.

~ Alex Sanchez

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

~ Naomi Wolf

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.

~ Naomi Wolf

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

~ Naomi Wolf

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as a human experiment--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.

~ Naomi Wolf

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

~ Naomi Wolf

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

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

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced beautiful images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that justify the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel worth less was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.

~ Naomi Wolf

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. 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.

~ Naomi Wolf

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

~ Naomi Wolf

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her Health: if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

~ Naomi Wolf

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

~ Naomi Wolf

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

~ Naomi Wolf

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

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

~ Naomi Wolf

I have found that most people are more willing to accept physical pain and limitation rather than acknowledge and deal with the mental and/or emotional pain that might have caused it.

~ Tobe Hanson

Maybe beauty had nothing to do with the garbage TV tried to sell us. It was more a matter of confidence. Either way, I had none.

~ Gaia B. Amman

But no matter what my eyes report, there is beauty that lives under the skin, under the surface, under the standards set up for me by outside arbiters of what is good and true. Those arbiters are not always so reliable. They can be bought and sold. They can be marketed and manufactured. The real standards, the ones set forth by the One who made me, are solid, knitted into me at my beginning. This beauty is true and real, and it lives within the heart. It is my heart that must be trained to recognize this beauty.

~ Angela Doll Carlson

The flower of the ginger is superb and regal, but if we focus on nurturing the ginger plant to bloom we are unable to harvest its root. Enjoying the exquisite beauty of the plant will prevent us from unlocking its true potential—the nutrients secretly stored beyond the reach of the sun. Why care about trivial matters such as external beauty? What matters lies beneath the surface. What a waste! She is much more beautiful on the inside where she has so much more to give to the world.

~ Jamie Le Fay

I used to never get in a swimsuit. I used to feel so embarrassed about my skin and scars. I'm over that, it wasted too much of my time and I missed out on too much.

~ Stephanie Nielson

There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it's the upkeep that costs, that's what Balzac said, not the initial investment.

~ Joanna Walsh

When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug - riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches.

~ Benjamin Percy

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