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BEAUTY TYRRANY

What a way to control us. This skinny thing is genius…. If you're hungry you don't have a lot of energy, and it's really hard to think. You can't do anything except think about food! What women are doing to their bodies is so utterly frightening - and, more importantly, so distracting. And if we don't get off it it's going to be devastating. My philosophy is a longing for women to stop trying to transcend their body, in an assertion of intellectual equality, but to name and return to it as a source of female wisdom and power.

Eve Ensler, author of Vagina Monologues

Women have fallen for a post-feminist delusion that the greater their physical self-control, the greater their prospects of happiness, not realising that alienation from their own bodies actaully destroys the possibility of empowerment.

The single greatest source of futile preoccupation and self-reproach in women's lives today - even the apparently most liberated women's lives - is the very thing that makes them female. It is taken for granted that a woman will despise at least part, if not all, of her body, and increasingly considered advisable for her to go to any lengths to correct it. Self-acceptance would be tantamount to self-neglect.

Despite having opportunities now to change the world, when asked what single change they would like to achieve, repeated surveys of women always produce the same answer: weigh less.

Plastic surgery … is not only routine, but sold to women as a trophy of empowerment: you're an independent girl now, you can afford to buy this gift to yourself.

Decca Aitkenhead, journalist