Michelle P

“No one is going to tell you who to marry, or what career to pursue, or how to cut your hair, and so you're thrown back on yourself. The freedom to chose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends to the construction of the self. This, I think, is the steady pulse of agitation behind an unsettled appetite, this wobbling, reaching anxiety, which craves relief, stalks it, hunts it down in tangible forms: Eat the cake, which will assuage some internal emptiness; buy that jacket, which will cloak you in an identity; call that man, who will define and give shape to your life.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“And as any good feminist economist will tell you, the deflecting power of consumerism has a long and well-earned reputation for serving men, and serving them quite effectively: They control the marketplace, and they permit women to be in charge of the goods, an activity that fills up lots of time, steers energy in limited and specific directions (toward decorating, adorning, pleasing the eye), and also has marvelously mind-numbing effect.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author), Appetites: Why Women Want

“The tough part, of course, have to do with finding love, and then taking that sledgehammer and breaking out of the box long enough to hold onto it, which in itself is no small feat. That job involves naming desires, and it involves understanding what stands in its way, and it involves mustering the strength and courage and self-acceptance to smash through the constraints, consequences be damned. The key - the bridge to the shore - is agency, a feeling (almost always hard-won) that marries entitlement with power: I deserve to be filled becomes I can be filled, I can make it happen.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“At that point on the continuum of cultural history, several degrees from active or meaningful talk about what beauty and power and confidence actually meant, I thought I should know, intuitively, how to be that woman, how to combine sexuality and ambition, how to navigate all those fuzzy lines between femininity and authority, relationships and autonomy. And not knowing these things intuitively, I thought I was missing something, or had missed something, or (more hopefully) might acquire something if only I looked in the right place...if only, if only. This is what's insidious about consumerism: It's not that it encourages us to shop but that it encourages us to forget, not that it sparks need but that it dilutes it, shrink-wraps it and flings it into the handiest and most tangible containers.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)