McKenna

“In a different lab study, researchers found that compared to men assigned to play Pac-Man or The Sims, those who spent twenty-five minutes playing a sexualized video game called Leisure Suit Larry later rated sexual harassment of women as more acceptable.18 Men in the Leisure Suit condition were also quicker to identify words like slut, whore, and bitch in a word-identification task, suggesting that the objectifying imagery in the game primed them to think of women in these ways.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women—and Its Impact on Health and Happiness

“In a very real sense, I’m no longer in charge of my life. I’m still culpable, but sin, like a cancer, lives in me. It’s commandeered my flesh and now it runs the show. I feel like a bystander in my own life. I’m divided against myself. I can decide to do what’s good, but I can’t execute that decision. I don’t do the good that I will, I do the evil that I despise. Do you see what I mean? If I don’t do the good that I choose, then I’m not the one making the decisions. It’s sin that decides.”
― Adam S. Miller, Grace Is Not God's Backup Plan: An Urgent Paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Romans

“Consider the bind this puts women in. You live in a culture that demands that you focus on your own appearance and promises others will do the same. But this evidence suggests that the more people think about your appearance, the less likely they will be to view you as competent.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women—and Its Impact on Health and Happiness

“There is only one’s own mournful horror, one’s worthless moral vanity—which can do nothing. The bad news of the world, like most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say look, you say see. That is all.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?