“Culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.”

“Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence--but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson--that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them.”

“Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.”

“Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.”

“As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.”

“The French: a people who have used their sophisticated culture and beautiful language to bequeath to the world the sliced potato.”