Thick: And Other Essays

I think these writers are confronted: If she is no longer a beautiful woman in front of the camera, then what is she possibly doing there?

some point, every single one of these women has “failed”—or, perhaps more generously, presented inconsistencies—in her resistance. Those moments shouldn’t be read as failures, however, so much as testaments to the sheer tenacity of the ideologies of femininity that shame, alienate, and expel those who refuse them.

Naomi Wolfe, journalist and author of The Beauty Myth, writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

Our systems, institutions, leaders and narratives about who and what we are — our lack of compassion and limited definitions of what a valued member of society is — are failing us. They have been failing us for quite some time