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Eating Disorders Quotes

Browse 374 quotes about Eating Disorders.

Eating Disorders Quotes

“Eating disorder recovery becomes possible when you keep making the next right decision over and over. With time, these decisions become automatic.”

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Author:Brittany Burgunder
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“It's like a stomach ache after not eating for five days. The muscles are starting to eat themselves, and you couldn't care less. It's about holding on to every moment with every ounce of your being, every atom. It's about memorising every expression, the way your muscles work, the way you speak, how your voice sounds during every part of the day. It's about not feeling the goodbye in every kiss, in every hug, in every touch. It's about trying to keep your voice steady even with a knife to your throat. It's August and I'm tired of being strong. I never really was very brave. Throw me on sharp edges, I've never felt so destructive.”

MissingDepressionHeartbreakMental HealthHeartacheEating DisordersAugustAnorexiaGoodbyesEd
Book:Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps
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“Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls espouses them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms.”

SexWomenCompetitionSocial MediaAdulthoodEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersCriticPerfect Body
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“Treatment of eating disorders is improved by the recognition that strenuous dieting arouses famine protection mechanisms that are prone to initiate a positive feedback spiral.”

WomenEating DisordersAnorexiaBulimiaPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchRegulation Mechanisms
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Eating disorders were not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate eating during famines were. ADHD was not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate attention were. Serious depression was not shaped by natural selection, but capacities for normal low and high mood were.”

WomenEating DisordersAnorexiaBulimiaPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchRegulation Mechanisms
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are surrounded by excess food, but their bodies are aware only of starvation. Their behavior is appropriate for a situation in which getting just a few extra calories might make the difference between life and death.”

WomenEating DisordersAnorexiaBulimiaPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchRegulation Mechanisms
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“The starting point is recognizing that selection has shaped powerful mechanisms to protect against starvation. During a famine, those mechanisms motivate animals to get food -any food- eat it quickly, and eat more than usual, because food supplies are obviously erratic. The system also adjusts the body weight set point upward because extra fat stores are valuable when food sources are unreliable. And, as noted already, weight loss slows down metabolism, which is appropriate when a person is starving but the opposite of what is needed when trying to lose weight. Also, intermittent access to food signals unreliable access to food supplies, so it increases food intake and bingeing, even in rats.”

WomenEating DisordersAnorexiaBulimiaPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchRegulation Mechanisms
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating disorders among boys as we see the reports of sexual abuse for male children increasing. Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders.”

MenCultureBoysShameSexual AbuseBody ImageEating DisordersChild Sexual AbuseMale Sexual Abuse
Book:Healing from the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse: The Journey for Women
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“The epidemiological evidence for sexual dimorphism in humans is extensive. Sexual dimorphism in body composition is already evident in infancy: males tend to be heavier than females at birth and have longer bodies and larger head circumferences. By early adulthood, sexual dimorphism in fat distribution is highly evident. These are the evolutionary roots of male sensitivity to visual cues of female physical attractiveness and also of women's motivation to display, preserve and improve their physical attractiveness and thus increase their perceived mate value. The extreme end of this adaptation gives rise to the risk of EDs in the modern environment.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“To understand mismatch, we should note that yhe human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“To understand mismatch, we should note that the human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“The Sexual Competition Hypothesis is based on the fact that throughout human evolutionary history the female shape has been a reliable indicator of the female's reproductive history and reproductive potential. The same is not true for men, where physical appearance, while relevant, is much less useful in assessing a man's reproductive potential. The visual signal for a female's peak reproductive potential in ancestral environments was the female's nubile shape, which was generally short-lived and declined with the repeated cycles of gestation and lactation.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimia Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“The pubertal surge of sex hormones plays a major role in the onset of eating symptoms in females, as shown by the fact that the heritability of Eating Disorders increases sharply at mid-puberty in girls, but not in boys. In particular, binge eating is strongly modulated by the interaction of estrogens and progesterone acrosss the menstrual cycle, consistent with the role played by these hormones in the regulation of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“The sexual competition model of eating disorders has two interlocking components. The first component is based on the universal male preference for a nubile -hourglass- body shape and the fact that women tend to accumulate body weight as they age, with the result that relative thinness is a reliable cue of youth and reproductive potential. The second component is specific to modern societies: as fertility declines and the age of reproduction shifts upward, women tend to retain an attractive nubile shape for longer, which increases the importance of thinness as an attractive display. At the same, a number of converging trends contribute to intensify real and perceived mating competition among women, especially for long-term partners. Specifically, socially imposed monogamy reduces the number of available men; urban living dramatically increases the number of potential desirable competitors; and the media paint a visual landscape full of unrealistically thin, attractive women. The net outcome of these social changes is a process of runaway sexual competition that leads to an exaggerated desire for thinness in girls and women. Ironically, the process is largely driven by female intrasexual competition rather than direct male choice, and the resulting -ideal body- may be too thin to be maximally attractive to men.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Mortality in Eating Disorders is partly caused by the medical complications of starvation and bingeing-purging, but suicide risk is also elevated. Suicide accounts for about 20% of deaths in anorexic patients; unsurprisingly, the risk is higher in AN-Bingeing/Purging than in AN-Restricted.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptons; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thiness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Androgens in Eating Disorders show an intriguing pattern: while anorexics tend to have low testosterone, there are indications that bulimia is associated with exposure to high levels of prenatal androgens. In addition, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOs, a condition caused by elevated androgens) has been associated with increased BN risk but decreased AN risk.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Ferguson and colleagues also reviewed that thin models in the media have comparatively small effects on body dissatisfaction, and mainly on women with preexisting weight concerns and/or high neuroticism. Instead, the largest and most consistent effects are those of mating competition in the peer network -that is, the number of attractive and available women in one's inmediate social environment (for example, friends and colleagues).”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“The pubertal surge of sex hormones plays a major role in the onset of eating symptoms in females, as shown by the fact that the heritability of Eating Disorders increases sharply at mid-puberty in girls, but not in boys. In particular, binge eating is strongly modulated by the interaction of estrogens and progesterone acrosss the menstrual cycle, consistent with the role played by these hormones in the regulaion of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“A thinness ideal at the social and individual levels is not the only precondition for the bingeing-purging cycle: bingeing require easy access to large amounts of high-calorie food, and most purging methods are impractical without modern plumbing and sanitation.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Food restriction does not necessarily lead to self-starvation; in fact, a common effect of sustained weight loss is a tendency to binge whenever food is available (typically with feelings of automaticity and loss of control). Common triggers for binges include tempting food and excessive hunger, but also interpersonal stressors and strong emotions. To compensate for impulsive overeating, some people start to adopt purging behaviors such as vomiting and laxative use. The combination of bingeing and purging may lead to the onset of a self-reinforcing cycle. Especially in the early stages of the cycle, bingeing and purging cause intense guilt, shame and anxiety. Those negative emotions may then trigger more binges or prompt renewed attempts to restrict food, which ultimately end up strengthening the cycle. Bingeing and purging can be rewarding on a number of levels. On the one hand, these symptoms relieve anxiety, boredom, emptiness, and other negative feelings; on the other hands, they prevent stressful interactions with other people (e.g. staying home from school or work to binge), attract attention from family and friends, and may provide a way to communicate one's ill-defined psychological distress in concrete terms. Over time, the behavioral sequence of bingeing and purging becomes more automatic and less emotionally intense, but also harder to interrupt.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“The self-starvation cycle has been documented across time and cultures, including non-Western ones. In modern Western societies, concerns with fat and thinness are the main reason for weight loss and probably explain the moderate rise of Anorexia Nervosa incidence across the second half of the 20th century. However, cases of self-starvation with spiritual and religious motivations have been common in Europe at least since the Middle Ages (and include several Catholic saints, most famously St. Catherine of Siena). In some Asian cultures, digestive discomfort is often cited as the initial reason for restricting food intake, but the resulting syndrome has essentially the same symptoms as anorexia in Western countries.”

MindFemaleEvolutionary PsychologyEating DisordersEvolutionary PsychopathologyAnorexia NervosaTcaBulimina Nervosa
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. 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. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence "You're beautiful," which is next to "I love you" in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is destined to be unhappy. And the "luckiest" woman of all, told she is loved because she's "beautiful," is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]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.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“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.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“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.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“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!”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsDietingPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll's house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“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.”

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Book:The Beauty Myth
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“The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.”

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Author:Naomi Wolf
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“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.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“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.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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“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.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
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