“Let’s get this out of the way: I’m an author, an editor, and a person with a lot of bucket-list goals. This is allegedly attractive to the men I’ve dated — progressive, liberal guys who are proud to have been raised by badass working moms. Until it isn’t. At some point, it seems, they subconsciously…”— Hannah Orenstein, thecut.com
“Untangling the lessons of girlhood from the cultural works that teach them to us is impossible; they are often our most committed teachers.”— Sophie Gilbert, theatlantic.com
“I’ll always owe The Beauty Myth a large part of my own feminist identity. But it’s not a fairy tale I’ll be handing to my own daughter.”— Rebecca Onion, slate.com
“Don’t hate them because they’re beautiful — ask yourself why you’re not.”— EJ Dickson, rollingstone.com
“Sex workers and their allies are dismissed as the ‘pimp lobby’. Trans people and their allies become the ‘trans cabal’, or in an incredibly offensive formulation, the ‘trans Taliban’…. And any challenge to reactionary feminist views is repackaged, via these conspiracy theories, as evidence that they…”— Alison Phipps, amazon.com
“While 2010 is on the line, would it also like petty, 20-year-old Taylor back? Because she seems to have also wandered into the present.”— Heather Schwedel, slate.com
“Increasingly it is personal choice – not death – that sees senior-age women going it alone, with 72 per cent reporting they were highly satisfied living on their own, according to data from the 2017 General Social Survey.”— Zosia Bielski, theglobeandmail.com
“While many in this generation of heterosexual, divorced or widowed women want male companionship, they don’t necessarily relish the thought of moving in with a man.”— Zosia Bielski, theglobeandmail.com
“What is beautiful about her body does not belong to her, but to god. But what is ugly is hers alone, proof of her sin, worthy of any abuse.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“Women are conditioned to meet this uncomfortable standard, whether we want to or not, and men aren’t. So we have to learn how to twist our body in all sorts of shapes and suck dick until we cry and men get away with not even giving head sometimes? Sick! Love this existence x”— Maddy Mussen, thetab.com
“Why do women care so much what the magazines say and show? They care because, though magazines are trivialized, they represent something very important: women's mass culture”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“To be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“The working woman was told she had to think about 'beauty' in a way that undermined, step for step, the way she had begun to think as a result of the successes of the women's movement. This last vital lie applied to individual women's lives the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action the…”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“What it needed was a replacement shackle, a new material burden that would drain surplus energy and lower confidence, an ideology that would produce the women workers it needs, but only in the mold in which it wants them.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“In the West, where paid labor centers on a forty-hour week, the unavoidable fact to confront the power structure is that women newcomers came from a group used to working more than twice as hard and long as men. And not only for less pay; for none.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“Aging in women is "unbeautiful" since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“Beth Harmon is a powerful figure and instantly iconic because her story isn’t about overcoming her setbacks: it’s about her.”— Carrie Wittmer, consequenceofsound.net