Sloane

“Not all men! cry the good ones. They don’t want to be feared, so it is our job to fix our fear. That is, sure, being a woman who gets assaulted and fears it at every turn sucks, but it’s not as bad as getting your feelings hurt. It is the job of women to caretake the feelings of good men, even at the cost of our own safety. We are trained from birth to accommodate them and their uncontrollable urges.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“True love is not the reward for a successful campaign to domesticate oneself. It is the thing I was practicing all of those years ago, in my own constructive play. It is entering the woods a stranger, shaking loose the stories assigned you, and naming the world as you meet it, together.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Part of what drives beauty sickness in women is the feeling that beauty is some essential ingredient to bringing about happiness. How could we not feel that way, when so much of the media we consume reinforces that idea?”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women

“Once when I was in graduate school, I got a terrible case of the flu and dropped a good deal of weight in a short amount of time. When I returned to campus, a professor said, “You look good! Did you lose weight?” When I responded that I had lost weight because I’d been seriously ill, she just shrugged and said, “Well, however it happened, looks good!” I remember that moment as such a clear example that much of what we claim to be health-based concern about other women’s weight is not at all. It’s nothing more than an ill-disguised bit of buy-in to a culture that says our worth is determined by our body size and that less is always more, no matter how we get there.”
― Renee Engeln, Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women