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“Women have been programmed to view our bodies only in terms of how they look and feel to others, rather than how they feel to ourselves, and how we wish to use them. We are surrounded by media images portraying women as essentially decorative machines of consumer function, constantly doing battle with rampant decay. (Take your vitamins every day and he might keep you, if you don’t forget to whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your grey hair and iron out your wrinkles....) As women, we fight this depersonalization every day, this pressure toward the conversion of one’s own self-image into a media expectation of what might satisfy male demand.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“Every woman has a record of her body—a closet full of jeans and bras of various sizes, albums full of photographs revealing periods of weight gain and loss.”
― Padma Lakshmi, Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

“If a woman is asking for birth control, it's because she needs it. The request itself is enough.”
― Aude Mermilliod, Le ChÅ“ur des femmes

“...from all accounts, the war within the war is a war on women's bodies.”
― Karyn L. Freedman, One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery

“The problem is not that erotically charged images
can’t also be seen as culturally valuable expressions (they
can), but that woman’s highest cultural expression has been
as a passive sex object, and not as an artist or creator of
culture herself. This has limited what women have been able
to achieve in a patriarchal society that cannot separate
women’s value and worth from a very fixed idea of their
sexuality.”
― Catherine McCormack, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

“I get so tired of being a woman, because I can never seem to be "done" in the way that others want to "do" me. I just want to take my body off, hang it on a hook, and grab some air, because every stroke, whisper, request, poke, brush, smile, squeeze, lick, kiss, and breath can feel like a fight for territory.”
― Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth

“Maybe someday, companies shilling skinny drinks will realize that the last thing a woman needs after a long day is to pick up a bottle that is going to body-shame her. Instead they might start using their enormous marking and manufacturing power to sell women a drink that isn't infused with self-hatred.”
― Mallory O'Meara, Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol

“.... freedom from an interfering government is not the only barrier to genuine autonomy. The right to reflect is not universal. It is a privilege afforded to those of us in affluent societies who have time to spare, and who are not otherwise burdened by fundamental problems, like poverty, malnutrition or ill health, problems that, at least in male-dominated societies, women suffer disproportionately. Add to this women’s lack of equality under the law in those same societies, as well as their lack of equal access to education and basic social institutions of welfare, and it becomes clear that it is not just women’s bodies but their basic human rights that are under attack in male-dominated societies.”
― Karyn L. Freedman, One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery

“[We are]expected to be wooed and seduced by the male artist’s libidinous vision, a vision that has dominated and come to define our perception of genius, beauty and value from the perspective of the white
heterosexual male artist.”
― Catherine McCormack, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

“Picasso and Modigliani’s ‘Venusesâ€� represent a sort of iconoclasm in their self-conscious rejection of the cold, perfectly-finished, stuffy beauty of the Western tradition of art. For the contemporary viewer they have become a reassuring confirmation of left-of-centre politics, of anti-establishment positions and of an intellectual kudos that doesn’t need art to look classical to be meaningful. And the frankness of the male artist’s unflinchingly libidinal vision is taken as evidence of the separation from restrictive bourgeois respectability and taste.”
― Catherine McCormack, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

“This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies - it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty