#appetites

"In its pop culture manifestation, this is where the goddess comes in. She turns male fear into female fear; she makes us wary of our own flesh; she cloaks old suspicions in new clothes, an ancient ambivalence merely veiled in Versace and scented with Chanel. Look closely. The goddess’s shape—not an ounce of fat on it, nothing bulging or protruding or exceeding its limits—presents an ideal based above all on the need for containment, as though something dangerous or repulsive might break through if the female body were not carefully managed and controlled; her beauty—highly stylized, detached, youthful often to the point of prepubescence—is constructed as something that’s attained only by eradicating much of what is natural—powerful, ample, generative—about the female form." "Appetites: Why Women Want" by Caroline Knapp, 2003

"Weight, weight, weight; abs, butt, thighs. Any woman with a modicum of self-awareness understands what this material is intended to do. It is goddess worship, goddess religion for the consumer age, commandments chiseled on skin and bone, and it’s designed to whip us mere mortals into a frenzy of inadequacy so potent it causes us to act, to go forth and buy the magazine and the many products it advertises. Thou shalt be thin, the goddess commands. Thou shalt not have wrinkles. Thou shalt compare and contrast. Thou shalt fail to measure up." — "Appetites: Why Women Want" by Caroline Knapp, 2003