no. 453

"When you say average, do you mean that basically if you tightly gathered all the girls in the world, it would turn into that girl!!? That would be a girl crystal!! Th-that would be a jewel!"

Shinohara En, the cross-dressing, girl-loving protagonist of Komura Ayumi's manga Usotsuki Lily, vol. 0, ch. 4, pg. 30


As someone who has long been a champion of seeing beauty in the "ordinary", I find this to be a lovely statement.

no. 378

"Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a woman’s body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounded hips - have become distateful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men."

Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power


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no. 373

"When you start to really know someone, all their physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in their energy, recognize the scent of their skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant."

Lisa Unger


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no. 372

"Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside."

Egon Schiele

no. 346

"…there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel sexy. I want your idea of sexiness to be grounded in what makes you feel awesome and comfortable and excited inside of your own awesome and unique body, whatever shape or size that body might be. I don’t want you to feel forced to conform yourself to anyone else’s idea of what sexiness is. But you have nothing—absolutely nothing—to be ashamed of if you want boys or girls to find you attractive. It is normal and natural and OK for you to find other people sexy, too, and to have sexual desire. This does not make you a slut. It makes you a perfectly typical teenager."

A Message To Teen Girls About That Letter From Mrs. Hall


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no. 271

no. 243

1. Recognize the System: That’s right, there’s a system, and it’s a vicious one. The first step to feeling better about yourself is to recognize that there are people who are trying to make you feel down even when you don’t even notice it. It’s shitty to realize, but it’s harder to fight an invisible opponent than one you see. This system is a core of advertising and media messages that exist to create a vision of the ‘perfect girl/guy’, and when you don’t fit it (and I’m saying when because chances are you don’t and that’s totally okay) they trick you into buying a bunch of bullshit you don’t need so you can ‘strive towards perfection’ or whatever. That’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit. Call them on their bullshit and never stop calling them on their bullshit.

Izzy (maybe), one of 10 points from Body Positivity Things to Remember

no. 209

"A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, it is an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history."

Naomi Wolf

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no. 203

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

Kurt Vonnegut

no. 196

"You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female'."

Erin McKean, You Don’t Have to Be Pretty

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no. 135

“[Women’s magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age…By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.”

Dalma Heyn

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