“A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

“The proof that the One Stone Solution is political lies in what women feel when they eat 'too much': guilt. Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female fat be a moral issue articulated with words like good and bad? If our culture's fixation on female fatness of thinness were about sex, it would be a private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself. Public debate would be far more hysterically focused on male fat than on female, since more men [40 percent] are medically overweight than women [32 percent] and too much fat is far more dangerous for men than for women......But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community.”

“...there us a difference you know, between the male and the female ghost-""What is the difference?" Georgina asked."Oh, the male ghost is obsessed with venegemce, I find." Lear said, drinking again."And what are females obsessed by?" Hugh asked."Prick songs," Lear said. "Snogging. Same as when they are alive, really.”

“Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”

“…her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.”