#mages

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #images #marketing #media #scoiety

Beauty is so rare a th— Sing a new song Real Music A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A Visiting card — from 15 False Propositions Against God [1958] ↗

— Jack Spicer

#images #leap #poetry #beauty

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#apathy #compassion #images #communication

How can women be in the image of God if God cannot be imaged in female form? ↗

— Marcus J. Borg

#images #women #faith

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend. ↗

— Héloïse d'Argenteuil

#company #consolation #friends #friendship #images

Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg. ↗

— Scarlett Thomas

#cybernetics #ideas #images #thoughts #life

There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#assert #contained #except #images #itself

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#images #imagination #senses #writing #imagination

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #consumer #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics #culture