Women's Body Shape Quotes

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.

It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible. Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a 'hungry' one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The 'hungry' one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping.

Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?

I wonder how many women you've disregarded in your life, written off, because you assumed they had nothing to offer beyond the way they looked. How quickly they learned that the stuff in their heads was of less value than the shape of their bodies. I bet they were all smarter than you.

Don’t tell thin women to eat a cheeseburger. Don’t tell fat women to put down the fork. Don’t tell underweight men to bulk up. Don’t tell women with facial hair to wax, don’t tell uncircumcised men they’re gross, don’t tell muscular women to go easy on the dead-lift, don’t tell dark-skinned women to bleach their vagina, don’t tell black women to relax their hair, don’t tell flat-chested women to get breast implants, don’t tell “apple-shaped” women what’s “flattering,” don’t tell mothers to hide their stretch marks, and don’t tell people whose toes you don’t approve of not to wear flip-flops. And so on, etc, etc, in every iteration until the mountains crumble to the sea. Basically, just go ahead and CEASE telling other human beings what they “should” and “shouldn't” do with their bodies unless a) you are their doctor, or b) SOMEBODY GODDAMN ASKED YOU.

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.

Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. (p. 80-81)

First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done. I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer's features as a lip or an eye. But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face. “Is it?...is it?” I whispered to my guide. “Not at all,” said he. “It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” “She seems to be...well, a person of particular importance?” “Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” “And who are these gigantic people...look! They're like emeralds...who are dancing and throwing flowers before here?” “Haven't ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.” “And who are all these young men and women on each side?” “They are her sons and daughters.” “She must have had a very large family, Sir.” “Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.” “Isn't that a bit hard on their own parents?” “No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.” “And how...but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat-two cats-dozens of cats. And all those dogs...why, I can't count them. And the birds. And the horses.” “They are her beasts.” “Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.” “Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.” I looked at my Teacher in amazement. “Yes,” he said. “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough int the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver

now you have the body shape considered ideal to the women you seek to cultivate—delicately emaciated, with just a hint of a well-managed eating disorder.

Don't tell me I'm "too tall" just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot physically look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.

She was beautiful. Not despite her so-called flaws but because of them—those scrapes and life experiences that made her body like no other woman’s. The beauty that wasn’t ephemeral or society-dictated but the real beauty that cut across generations, across all cultures, from the beginning of humankind. The beauty that was painted in Paleolithic caves and carved in ancient Venus statuettes, those wonderful figurines of all shapes and sizes, individualized and gorgeous precisely because of that individuality. What cavemen had known, modern men had forgotten, and sadly, modern women too.

I grit my teeth against the little stab of jealousy I feel. What the hell’s that all about? Anyone will tell you I don’t have a jealous bone in my body. There are too many willing women in the world to get all bent out of shape over one. Envy is just not in me. Not usually.

I'm mad because girls as young as eight years old are being shamed about their bodies. Fifth graders go on diets and admire Instagram pics of celebs in waist trainers. Some of the people I'm closest to have struggled with eating disorders. I'm mad at an industry that suggests that painfully thin is the only acceptable way to be. Please don't get on me for skinny shaming. If that's how you are shaped, God bless, but we gotta mix it up, because it's upsetting and confusing to women with other body types.

PLANETARIUM Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatsoever.

Don't tell me I'm "too tall" just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.

Take a careful look around you the next time you’re walking in a crowded area. If you pay close attention, you’ll see women of myriad body shapes and sizes, hair colors, facial features, and ages. It’s easy to forget the actual landscape of women’s appearances, because the range of what we see in media is so narrow.

You’re showing young girls that you don’t have to be thin to be beautiful, many a freshly body positive women’s mag editor has started off an interview with me, causing my pelvic floor to seize up in a fit of fury. No, I correct them, I’m showing young girls that you don’t have to be beautiful to matter. The thinking that women of all shapes and sizes can be beautiful is still hugely problematic, because it is predicated on the idea that the most important thing a woman has to offer the world is her appearance.

Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers, you readers and writers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it's time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we are the ones who look slowly around when we get off a bus and can't even find what we are looking for, can't quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next, what terrible thing will come next. We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long heavy hours sunk in our bodies, thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for something to come to us and give a shape to so much pain.

If so, why has a naturally masculine shape (broad shoulders, no waist, narrow hips, flat belly) become the ideal for the female body? Why is it that those aspects of a woman’s body that are most closely related to her innate female power, the capacity of her belly, hips, and thighs to carry and sustain life, are diminished in our society’s version of a beautiful woman?

Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better. Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing. Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever. Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions. Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them. Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides. Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not. Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to. Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced. Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real. There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla: There is no wrong way to have a body. I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body. And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap. You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real. Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me

Claims have been made that I've been on a strict workout routine regulated by co-stars, whipped into shape by trainers I've never met, eating sprouted grains I can't pronounce and ultimately losing 14 pounds off my 5'3" frame. Losing 14 pounds out of necessity in order to live a healthier life is a huge victory. I'm a petite person to begin with, so the idea of my losing this amount of weight is utter lunacy. If I were to lose 14 pounds, I'd have to part with both arms. And a foot.

Andre had been telling her an ancient legend of the fall of man into evil. It came about, he said, by the hand of a woman, Eve, who gave man forbidden fruit. "And how was this woman to know that the fruit was forbidden?" Madame Wu had inquired. "An evil spirit, in the shape of a serpent, whispered it to her," Andre had said. "Why to her instead of to the man?" she had inquired. "Because he knew that her mind and her heart were fixed not upon the man, but upon the pursuance of life," he had replied. "The man's mind and heart were fixed upon himself. He was happy enough, dreaming that he possessed the woman and the garden. Why should he be tempted further? He had all. But the woman could always be tempted by the thought of a better garden, a larger space, more to possess, because she knew that out of her body would come many more beings, and for them she plotted and planned. The woman thought not of herself, but of the many whom she would create. For their sake she was tempted. For their sake she will always be tempted.

As we drove to the trailer, the sun dipping in the sky, its last rays reaching across the highway, I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.

Second, the control of Black women’s reproduction has shaped the meaning of reproductive liberty in America.

. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.

I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear. Indeed, 'tis true that Henry told me of; For I have often heard my mother say I came into the world with my legs forward: Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste, And seek their ruin that usurp'd our right? The midwife wonder'd and the women cried 'O, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth!' And so I was; which plainly signified That I should snarl and bite and play the dog. Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so, Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it. I have no brother, I am like no brother; And this word 'love,' which graybeards call divine, Be resident in men like one another And not in me: I am myself alone.

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.

It wasn't about a women's weight, it was about who they were, if that brightness shone through their eyes and skin and hair. Ricco found beauty in art. Women were a form of art. All shapes and sizes. All body types.

Some of us fall through the unseen cracks in the world of health on a bright summer’s day through a run-in with machine or microbe, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Some of us were born this way. And some find out that our genes have hidden within them a ticking time bomb. Waiting. Silently. However we got here, we are now inhabitants of the state of sickness. Our papers for the world of health have been rescinded without notice. Our body-world has been colonised by patriarchs, and we, the natives, should know our place: small folded patient, compliant, silent, not defiant. They seem to believe that our bodies are just an errant version of theirs. That our souls are not woman-shaped on the inside. That it’s not our place to take our space and insist on our inner difference. Their gospel is scribbled down on prescription pads in spider scrawl. They are not to be questioned, especially not with our own heresy.

If you want to compliment a girl or woman, compliment her on something she can actually control. Reinforce the idea that being hardworking, focused, kind, creative, and generous matter. None of these qualities require any particular body shape or hairstyle. Tell her you notice how much effort she puts into the things she cares about. Tell her that you enjoy spending time with her because she is interesting. Tell her that she inspires you and then explain why or how.

The grassy park was lined with dozens of kissing booths. Twinkle lights draped back-and-forth between tall trees, making a canopy of stars above the red and pink tables below. People were lined up at each booth, applying lipstick and perfume as they readied for their purchased kisses. Behind the booths stood a large white gazebo housing a group of musicians. As a love song filled the air, couples intertwined their bodies and swayed to the melody. Here and there, children ran about wearing red hats and eating lip-shaped chocolates, while women waited impatiently for quickie makeovers under a flashy pink tent. The park was littered with couples kissing behind trees and making out on park benches. And paper stars were everywhere; in trees, on the ground, above heads, inside mouths…. It was like Valentine’s Day. On crack.

Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.

It is considered normal for women and girls in the United States to have hair, a reality shaped to varying degrees by the default of Westernized beauty standards. In Western societies hair is often tied to notions of femininity, beauty and gender. Having hair is what is expected of a "normal" woman or girl. Of course, there is an endless screed of rules governing our notions of normal hair. One cannot have too much hair or too little.

The ‘big three’ desirable features for a heterosexual man’s mate are perhaps unsurprising – femininity, health, fertility. Men seek women who look obviously like women; men seek women who have good genes and are healthy; men seek women who look like they have years of efficient breeding ahead of them.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options. Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that ‘our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.’ This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade. They aim not to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it.

The idea that a woman's body has boundaries that must not be violated is fairly new. We evidently haven't taken it far enough. Can we extend that idea? Or are women the pliable sex, innately dapted to being shaped, cut, and subjected to physical invasion? Does the female body deserve the same notion of integrity as the male body?

childbirth shapes women as a horizon of anticipation. Women come into consciousness, she speculated, imagining a future pain toward which their bodies inevitably propel them.

I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided.

The women we become after children, she typed, then stopped to adjust the angle of the paper....We change shape, she continued, we buy low-heeled shoes, we cut off our long hair, We begin to carry in our bags half-eaten rusks, a small tractor, a shred of beloved fabric, a plastic doll. We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, persoective. Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies. They breathe, they eat, they crawl and-look!-they walk, they begin to speak to us. We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squashed tin along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going. We learn to darn, perhaps to cook, to patch knees of dungarees. We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us. We live, We contemplate our bodies, our stretched skin, those threads of silver around our brows, our strangely enlarged feet. We learn to look less in the mirror. We put our dry-clean-only clothes to the back of the wardrobe. Eventually we throw them away. We school ourselves to stop saying 'shit' and 'damn' and learn to say 'my goodness' and 'heavens above.' We give up smoking, we color our hair, we search the vistas of parks, swimming-pools, libraries, cafes for others of our kind. We know each other by our pushchairs, our sleepless gazes, the beakers we carry. We learn how to cool a fever, ease a cough, the four indicators of meningitis, that one must sometimes push a swing for two hours. We buy biscuit cutters, washable paints, aprons, plastic bowls. We no longer tolerate delayed buses, fighting in the street, smoking in restaurants, sex after midnight, inconsistency, laziness, being cold. We contemplate younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill.

Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and then there is the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. Even Gertrude Stein said of Picasso, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight…but his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism I was unable to resist.” By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot. What becomes of the man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.

When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it.

So here is what I see when we reclaim the church ladies: a woman loved and free is beautiful. She is laughing with her sisters, and together they are telling their stories, revealing their scars and their wounds, the places where they don't have it figured out. They are nurturers, creating a haven where the young, the broken, the tenderhearted, and the at-risk can flourish. These women are dancing and worshiping, hands high, faces tipped toward heaven, tears streaming. They are celebrating all shapes and sizes, talking frankly and respectfully about sexuality and body image, promising to stop calling themselves fat. They are saving babies tossed in rubbish heaps, rescuing child soldiers, supporting mamas trying to make ends meet halfway around the world, thinking of justice when they buy their daily coffee. They are fighting sex trafficking. They are pastoring and counseling. They are choosing life consistently, building hope, doing the hard work of transformation in themselves. They are shaking off the silence of shame and throwing open the prison doors of physical and sexual abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and suicidal depression. Poverty and despair are being unlocked - these women know there are many hands helping turn that key. There isn't much complaining about husbands and chores, cattiness, or jealousy when a woman knows she is loved for her true self. She is lit up with something bigger than what the world offers, refusing to be intimidated into silence or despair.

By simply dropping the official weight one stone below most women’s natural level, and redefining a woman’s womanly shape as by definition “too fat,” a wave of self-hatred swept over First World women, a reactionary psychology was perfected, and a major industry was born. It suavely countered the historical groundswell of female success with a mass conviction of female failure, a failure defined as implicit in womanhood itself.

Women. Some read that word and think beauty, assholes read it and think sandwiches, but those who bathe in intellect read that word and feel power. Our bodies, built in all different shapes and forms, all bared one thing in common; power. Without us, humanity would not exist. We bear our flesh and our bodies to create new humans, and then continue to nurture and care for them, that’s why when I’d see the word “women,” I thought of power.

I wonder how many women you've disregarded in your life, written off, because you assumed they had nothing to offer beyond the way they looked. How quickly they learned that the stuff in their heads was of less value than the shape of their bodies.

Eating disorders and body dissatisfaction are reaching epidemic proportions in the West, yet this is possible only in a culture that no longer believes that God causes all things, including one's body shape...The Qur'an's message is to be happy and content with one's body because God created our shapes: "He it is Who shapes you in the wombs as He pleases (3:6);" and He created us "in the best of moulds" (95:4). The Prophet used to advise people to be healthy and consume and exercise in moderation.

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

Maybe it’s something to do with the movements: the Cat and then the Cow, the twist to the left and then to the right, the reaching up, and then bending to the ground, the constant training of the body to move one way, and then to move in the opposite way. Hatha: sun, moon opposites, dark and light, yin and yang. This must be key in the way yoga shapes the mind and heart, in the way it helps one to understand that every movement has a counter movement, that every action has an opposing action, that the happy parts of life will be met by the sad, and the sad, in turn will be met by the happy.

And just as everyone’s genitals are normal and beautiful, so all women’s bodies are normal and beautiful. But mostly that’s not what women are taught. Mostly we’re taught that our bodies are supposed to be one specific shape, otherwise there’s something wrong with us. I’ll talk about that—and how to overcome it—in chapter 5.

This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul. His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete. It is very easy to see why the Viking wished his body to sail away in an unmanned ship, for neither could exist without the other; or, failing that, how it was necessary that the things he loved most, his women and his ship, lie with him and thus keep closed the circle. In the great fire on the shore, all three started at least in the same direction, and in the gathered ashes who could say where man or woman stopped and ship began?

Stanwyck was slim, and remained so over her career. Regardless of the obligations and pressures regarding size and shape for women in Hollywood, or her own needs and desires as an actress and a person, or the occasions within the films that show off her body, Stanwyck rarely advertises a superficial fantasy of feminine appearance. She is too busy exploring the subtlety of interactions.

This is just a form letter,” Jules pointed out. “And as for the test, maybe she went in for a checkup. Women are supposed to do that once a year, right? She’d been in Kenya, and suddenly here she was going to this health clinic with Molly, so she figured, what the heck. Maybe this place gives pregnancy tests as part of their regular annual exam.” “Yeah,” Max said. “Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Okay. Let’s run with the worst-case scenario. She is pregnant. I know it’s not like her to have a one-night stand, but . . .” Jules said, but then stopped. His words were meant to help, but, Hey, good news—the woman you love may have gotten knocked up from a night of casual sex with a stranger were not going to provide a whole hell of a lot of comfort. It didn’t matter that the idea was less awful than the terrible alternative—that Paul Jimmo had continued to pressure Gina. And he hadn’t taken no for an answer. Which was obviously what Max was thinking, considering the way he was working to grind down his few remaining back teeth. “So,” Jules said. “Looks like our little talk didn’t exactly succeed at putting you in a better place.” It was clear, when Max didn’t respond, that he was concentrating on not leaping through the window and flying—using his rage as a form of propulsion, across the street and blasting a body-shaped hole in the wall of that building where Gina and Molly were being held prisoner—please, heavenly father, let them be in there. And Jules knew that if it turned out that Paul Jimmo had so much as touched Gina without her consent, Max would find his grave, dig up his body, bring him back to life, and then kill the son of a bitch all over again.

When Elizabeth finally descended the stairs on her way to the dining room she was two hours late. Deliberately. “Good heavens, you’re tardy, my dear!” Sir Francis said, shoving back his chair and rushing to the doorway where Elizabeth had been standing, trying to gather her courage to do what needed to be done. “Come and meet my guests,” he said, drawing her forward after a swift, disappointed look at her drab attire and severe coiffure. “We did as you suggested in your note and went ahead with supper. What kept you abovestairs so long?” “I was at prayer,” Elizabeth said, managing to look him straight in the eye. Sir Francis recovered from his surprise in time to introduce her to the three other people at the table-two men who resembled him in age and features and two women of perhaps five and thirty who were both attired in the most shockingly revealing gowns Elizabeth had ever seen. Elizabeth accepted a helping of cold meat to silence her protesting stomach while both women studied her with unhidden scorn. “That is a most unusual ensemble you’re wearing, I must say,” remarked the woman named Eloise. “Is it the custom where you come from to dress so…simply?” Elizabeth took a dainty bite of meat. “Not really. I disapprove of too much personal adornment.” She turned to Sir Francis with an innocent stare. “Gowns are expensive. I consider them a great waste of money.” Sir Francis was suddenly inclined to agree, particularly since he intended to keep her naked as much as possible. “Quite right!” he beamed, eyeing the other ladies with pointed disapproval. “No sense in spending all that money on gowns. No point in spending money at all.” “My sentiments exactly,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “I prefer to give every shilling I can find to charity instead.” “Give it away?” he said in a muted roar, half rising out of his chair. Then he forced himself to sit back down and reconsider the wisdom of wedding her. She was lovely-her face more mature then he remembered it, but not even the black veil and scraped-back hair could detract from the beauty of her emerald-green eyes with their long, sooty lashes. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them-shadows he didn’t recall seeing there earlier in the day. He put the shadows down to her far-too-serious nature. Her dowry was creditable, and her body beneath that shapeless black gown…he wished he could see her shape. Perhaps it, too, had changed, and not for the better, in the past few years. “I had hoped, my dear,” Sir Francis said, covering her hand with his and squeezing it affectionately, “that you might wear something else down to supper, as I suggested you should.” Elizabeth gave him an innocent stare. “This is all I brought.” “All you brought?” he uttered. “B-But I definitely saw my footmen carrying several trunks upstairs.” “They belong to my aunt-only one of them is mine,” she fabricated hastily, already anticipating his next question and thinking madly for some satisfactory answer. “Really?” He continued to eye her gown with great dissatisfaction, and then he asked exactly the question she’d expected: “What, may I ask, does your one truck contain if not gowns?” Inspiration struck, and Elizabeth smiled radiantly. “Something of great value. Priceless value,” she confided. All faces at the table watched her with alert fascination-particularly the greedy Sir Francis. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, love. What’s in it?” “The mortal remains of Saint Jacob.

Understand that bodies are shaped by culture from the very get-go,” explains Fausto-Sterling. “If you neglect a child at birth, their brain stops developing and they’re pretty messed up. If you highly stimulate a child, if they’re within a normal developmental range, they now develop all sorts of capacities you didn’t know they had or didn’t have the potential to develop. So the question always goes back to how development works.

We have good news and bad news. The good news is that the dismal vision of human sexuality reflected in the standard narrative is mistaken. Men have not evolved to be deceitful cads, nor have millions of years shaped women into lying, two-timing gold-diggers. But the bad news is that the amoral agencies of evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can’t keep. Homo sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably sexual. Lusty libertines. Rakes, rogues, and roués. Tomcats and sex kittens. Horndogs. Bitches in heat.1 True, some of us manage to rise above this aspect of our nature (or to sink below it). But these preconscious impulses remain our biological baseline, our reference point, the zero in our own personal number system. Our evolved tendencies are considered “normal” by the body each of us occupies. Willpower fortified with plenty of guilt, fear, shame, and mutilation of body and soul may provide some control over these urges and impulses. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once in a blue moon. But even when controlled, they refuse to be ignored. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out, Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.) Acknowledged or not, these evolved yearnings persist and clamor for our attention. And there are costs involved in denying one’s evolved sexual nature, costs paid by individuals, couples, families, and societies every day and every night. They are paid in what E. O. Wilson called “the less tangible currency of human happiness that must be spent to circumvent our natural predispositions.”2 Whether or not our society’s investment in sexual repression is a net gain or loss is a question for another time. For now, we’ll just suggest that trying to rise above nature is always a risky, exhausting endeavor, often resulting in spectacular collapse. Any attempt to understand who we are, how we got to be this way, and what to do about it must begin by facing up to our evolved human sexual predispositions. Why do so many forces resist our sustained fulfillment? Why is conventional marriage so much damned work? How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socio-scientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy combined with a couple thousand years of fire and brimstone failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires? To see ourselves as we are, we must begin by acknowledging that of all Earth’s creatures, none is as urgently, creatively, and constantly sexual as Homo sapiens.

It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is, the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened, and her expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter, more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less assertive, more hesitant.

As I walked into Jubilee I repossessed the world. Trees, houses, fences, streets, cambe back to me, in their own sober and familiar shapes. Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self--my old devious, ironic, isolated self--beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided. Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone. —

I’ve met people in just about every shape and form in which they exist. And never, not ever, have I found a kind of people that is not breathtakingly gorgeous. Of course, all the world’s nationalities and ethnicities meet and mix in America, more than in any other country, and the results all are beautiful. What’s not beautiful to me is the typical advertising of women. I see it in all the world’s cities now: enormous billboards cast two stories high, parading some phony Western ideal of beauty—tall, bone thin, and mainly white.

American gynecology was built by torturing Black women and experimenting on their bodies to test procedures. J. Marion Sims, known as the father of American gynecology, developed his techniques by slicing open the vaginal tissues of enslaved women as they were held down by force. He refused to provide them with anesthesia. François Marie Prevost, who is credited with introducing C-sections in the United States, perfected his procedure by cutting into the abdomens of laboring women who were slaves. These women were treated like animals and their pain was ignored.

For all women—or maybe just all plus-size women, or maybe just me—there’s a moment right after you put on a new piece of clothing, after you’ve buttoned the buttons or zipped the zipper, but before you’ve seen how it looks—or, rather, how you look in it. A moment of just sensation, of feeling the fabric on your skin, the garment against your body, knowing where the waistband pinches or if the cuffs are the right length, an instant of perfect faith, of pure, untarnished hope that this dress, this blouse, this skirt, will be the one that transforms you, that makes you look shapely and pretty, and worthy of love, or respect, or whatever you most desire.

One point is certain: In many Gnostic circles women had a prominence they did not have in society at large. Part of the reason for this was that, since it is the spirit and not the body that is important, the shape of one’s body has little to do with eternal realities. Also, in many of the genealogies of eons with which Gnostics explained the origin of the world, there were female as well as male eons. It is quite possible that it was partly in response to this feature in Gnosticism that orthodox Christianity began restricting the role of women in the church, for it is clear that in first-century Christianity women had roles in the church that the second century began to deny them.

the vision I hold in my heart goes a little something like this: I see women the world over waking up on Sunday mornings feeling alive, grateful and filled with energy. They find their drug of choice at the farmers’ markets, or on their yoga mats, or while in intimate conversations with their most cherished friends. Their health radiates, their skin glows, and they effortlessly melt into their ideal body shape simply because they’ve decided to no longer run from themselves; no longer hide from feelings they would rather suppress. These women become magnets who attract beautiful, soulful people into their lives as a result of turning around and recognising the soulful beauty within themselves first. They

So get up, pretty woman! And from your beautifully shaped body don’t be ashamed For we are meant to be different, Rounded shapes and squared We come in a small, medium and a large size And to each there is still a wide range This is to create a beautiful portrait for the eyes And we are not supposed to please the “media-thinking” and change! So woman up! Whether your size is infinity-X large or infinity-X Small In love with “you” you should fall Don’t let them and their meaningless words or shallow looks Make you lose it all As to this nature you belong, The beach, the mountains, the oceans And the colorful life this mother earth has to give So embrace this with your body and soul No matter how they evolve… For as long as you live!

But Eugene was untroubled by thought of a goal. He was mad with such ecstasy as he had never known. He was a centaur, moon-eyed and wild of name, torn apart with hunger for the golden world. He became at times almost incapable of coherent speech. While talking with people, he would whinny suddenly into their startled faces, and leap away, his face contorted with an idiot joy. He would hurl himself squealing through the streets and along the paths, touched with the ecstasy of a thousand unspoken desires. The world lay before him for his picking—full of opulent cities, golden vintages, glorious triumphs, lovely women, full of a thousand unmet and magnificent possibilities. Nothing was dull or tarnished. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die. He went back to Pulpit Hill for two or three days of delightful loneliness in the deserted college. He prowled through the empty campus at midnight under the great moons of the late rich Spring; he breathed the thousand rich odours of tree and grass and flower, of the opulent and seductive South; and he felt a delicious sadness when he thought of his departure, and saw there in the moon the thousand phantom shapes of the boys he had known who would come no more. He still loitered, although his baggage had been packed for days. With a desperate pain, he faced departure from that Arcadian wilderness where he had known so much joy. At night he roamed the deserted campus, talking quietly until morning with a handful of students who lingered strangely, as he did, among the ghostly buildings, among the phantoms of lost boys. He could not face a final departure. He said he would return early in autumn for a few days, and at least once a year thereafter. Then one hot morning, on sudden impulse, he left. As the car that was taking him to Exeter roared down the winding street, under the hot green leafiness of June, he heard, as from the sea-depth of a dream, far-faint, the mellow booming of the campus bell. And suddenly it seemed to him that all the beaten walks were thudding with the footfalls of lost boys, himself among them, running for their class. Then, as he listened, the far bell died away, and the phantom runners thudded into oblivion. The car roared up across the lip of the hill, and drove steeply down into the hot parched countryside below. As the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back again. He saw the vast rich body of the hills, lush with billowing greenery, ripe-bosomed, dappled by far-floating cloudshadows. But it was, he knew, the end. Far-forested, the horn-note wound. He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless seduction. It was the end, the end. It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest of new lands. Gant was dead. Gant was living, death-in-life. In

But what might a woman say about church as she? What might a woman say about the church as body and bride? Perhaps she would speak of the way a regular body moves through the world—always changing, never perfect—capable of nurturing life, not simply through the womb, but through hands, feet, eyes, voice, and brain. Every part is sacred. Every part has a function. Perhaps she would speak of impossible expectations and all the time she’s wasted trying to contort herself into the shape of those amorphous silhouettes that flit from magazines and billboards into her mind. Or of this screwed-up notion of purity as a status, as something awarded by men with tests and checklists and the power to give it and take it away. Perhaps she would speak of the surprise of seeing herself—flaws and all—in the mirror on her wedding day. Or of the reality that with new life comes swollen breasts, dry heaves, dirty diapers, snotty noses, late-night arguments, and a whole army of new dangers and fears she never even considered before because life-giving isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds, but it’s a thousand times more beautiful. Perhaps she would talk about being underestimated, about surprising people and surprising herself. Or about how there are moments when her own strength startles her, and moments when her weakness—her forgetfulness, her fear, her exhaustion—unnerve her. Maybe she would tell of the time, in the mountains with bare feet on the ground, she stood tall and wise and felt every cell in her body smile in assent as she inhaled and exhaled and in one loud second realized, I’m alive! I’m enfleshed! only to forget it the next. Or maybe she would explain how none of the categories created for her sum her up or capture her essence.

Sara noticed that his white teeth were slightly snaggled, giving his smile the appearance of a friendly snarl. It was then that she understood why so many women had been seduced by him. His grin held a wickedly irresistible appeal. She stared at his chest as he untied the laces and positioned her cap correctly. "Thank you," she murmured, and tried to take the strings of the cap from his fingers. But he didn't let go. He held the laces at her chin, his fingers tightening. Glancing up at him in confusion, Sara saw that his smile had vanished. In a decisive motion he pulled the concealing lace from her hair and let it fall. The cap fluttered to a patch of mud and rested there limply. Sara lifted her hand to the loose braided coil of her hair, which threatened to tumble from its pins. The chestnut locks gleamed with fiery highlights, escaping in delicate wisps around her face and throat. "Mr. Craven," she scolded breathlessly. "I find your behavior untoward and a-and offensive, not to mention-oh!" She stammered in astonishment as he reached for her spectacles and plucked them from her face. "Mr. Craven, h-how dare you..." She fumbled to retrieve them. "I... I need those..." Derek held them out of reach as he stared at her uncovered face. This was what she had kept hidden beneath the old-maid disguise... pale, luminous skin, a mouth shaped with surprising lushness, a pert little nose, marked at the delicate bridge where the edge of her spectacles had pressed. Angel-blue eyes, pure and beguiling, surmounted by dark winged brows. She was beautiful. He could have devoured her in a few bites, like a fragrant red apple. He wanted to touch her, take her somewhere and pull her beneath him, as if he could somehow erase a lifetime of sin and shame within the sweetness of her body.

ASITA AWOKE in the forest thinking about demons. He hadn’t for many years. He could remember glimpsing one or two in the past, on the fringes of a famine or a battle, wherever bodies were being harvested. He knew the misery they caused, but misery was no longer Asita’s concern. He had been a forest hermit for fifty years. The affairs of the world had been kept far away, and he passed whole days in a hidden cave when he retreated even from the affairs of animals, much less those of men. Now Asita knelt by a stream and considered. He distinctly saw demons in his mind’s eye. They had first appeared in the dappled sunlight that fell on his eyelids at dawn. Asita slept on boughs strewn over the bare ground, and he liked the play of light and shadow across his eyes in the early morning. His imagination freely saw shapes that reminded him of the market village where he grew up. He could see hawking merchants, women balancing water jugs on their heads, camels and cara-vans—anything, really—on the screen of his closed eyes. But never demons, not before this morning. Asita walked into the nearly freezing mountain stream, his body naked except for a loincloth. As an ascetic, he did not wear clothes, not even the robes of a monastic order. Lately he had felt an impulse to travel very high, nearly in sight of the snowcapped peaks on the north-ern border of the Sakya kingdom. Which put him close to other lokas,worlds apart from Earth. Every mortal is confined to the Earth plane, but like the dense air of the jungle tapering gradually into the thin atmosphere of the mountains, the material world ta-pered off into subtler and subtler worlds. Devas had their own lokas, as did the gods and demons. Ancestors dwelt in a loka set apart for spirits in transition from one lifetime to the next.

Chirality matters. In the curious case of the artificial fragrance limonene, the right-handed form smells like an orange, whereas the left-handed version of this simple ring-shaped molecule smells like a lemon. The smell receptors in your nose are sensitive to chirality, so right- and left-limonene transmit slightly different signals to your brain. Taste buds are less sensitive to the differences between right- and left-handed sugars. They both taste sweet, but our body’s fine-tuned digestive system can process only the right-handed forms. The artificial sweetener tagatose, a zero-calorie left-handed sugar substitute, exploits these properties. The tragic story of thalidomide also rests on handedness. The right-handed version of this drug alleviated morning sickness in pregnant women, but the left-handed variant that inevitably tagged along caused birth defects. Today the FDA imposes strict requirements for chirally pure drugs—regulations

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were.

Our exploration into advertising and media is at its root a critique of the exploitative nature of capitalism and consumerism. Our economic systems shape how we see our bodies and the bodies of others, and they ultimately inform what we are compelled to do and buy based on that reflection. Profit-greedy industries work with media outlets to offer us a distorted perception of ourselves and then use that distorted self-image to sell us remedies for the distortion. Consider that the female body type portrayed in advertising as the “ideal” is possessed naturally by only 5 percent of American women. Whereas the average U.S. woman is five feet four inches tall and weighs 140 pounds, the average U.S. model is five feet eleven and weighs 117. Now consider a People magazine survey which reported that 80 percent of women respondents said images of women on television and in the movies made them feel insecure. Together, those statistics and those survey results illustrate a regenerative market of people who feel deficient based on the images they encounter every day, seemingly perfectly matched with advertisers and manufacturers who have just the products to sell them (us) to fix those imagined deficiencies.18

Indeed, it was delightful to read a man's writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter "I." One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter "I." One began to be tired of "I." Not but what this "I" was a most respectable "I"; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that "I" from the bottom of my heart. But- here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other - the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter "I" all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But... she has not a bone in her body.

Dii Nvwati (Cherokee). Translation: Skunk medicine. The skunk asks us to defend ourselves effectively, without causing further conflict. Self-protection but do no harm. Gangsterish peace-making. That is the kind of masculinity that I try to embody. With my leadership, with my poise, with my privileges. As my body continues on a journey of thickening, muscle hardening, limbs lengthening, Ayurvedic drying, shorter synapse pathways, fuzzier intuition, and choppier verbal articulation all facilitated by weekly testosterone injections these are poignant lessons to forward. The objective is for men and masculine people to not yield our power to others… Women and femme people don’t need our paternalistic sickle to swath as we ‘tap out.’ We must figure out power without domination. The skunk asks us to use our powers effectively, without wiping ourselves out. Without recapitulating top down, give-less-to-get-more social structures. Just as the skunk does not seek to be the bear, let us not attempt to trade places with the oppressor. Let us navigate a road of paradigm shifting that seeks to salve both current social and economic injuries, but also prepare a sustainable method of being for seven generations to come.

Mathilde watched as down the street came a little girl in a red snowsuit with purple racing stripes. Mittens, a cap too big for her head. Disoriented, the girl turned around and around and around. She began to climb the snow mountain that blocked her from the street. But she was so weak. Halfway up, she’d slip back down. She’d try again, digging her feet deeper into the drift. Mathilde held her breath each time, let it out when the girl fell. She thought of a cockroach in a wineglass, trying to climb up the smooth sides. When Mathilde looked across the street at a long brick apartment complex taking up the whole block, ornate in its 1920s style, she saw, in scattered windows, three women watching the little girl’s struggles. Mathilde watched the women as they watched the girl. One was laughing over her bare shoulder at someone in the room, flushed with sex. One was elderly, drinking her tea. The third, sallow and pinched, had crossed her skinny arms and was pursing her lips. At last, the girl, exhausted, slid down and rested, her face against the snow. Mathilde was sure she was crying. When Mathilde looked up again, the woman with crossed arms was staring angrily through all the glass and cold and snow directly at her. Mathilde startled, sure she’d been invisible. The woman disappeared. She reappeared on the sidewalk in inside clothes, tweedy and thin. She chucked her body into the snowdrift in front of the apartment building, crossed the street, grabbed the girl by the mittens and swung her over the mountain. Carried her across the street and did it again. Both mother and daughter were powdered with white when they went inside. Long after they were gone, Mathilde thought of the woman. What she was imagining when she saw her little girl fall and fall and fall. She wondered at the kind of anger that would crumple your heart up so hard that you could watch a child struggle and fail and weep for so long, without moving to help. Mothers, Mathilde had always known, were people who abandoned you to struggle alone. It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. A

In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes. We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music. We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

The sexual competition model of eating disorders has two interlocking components. The first component is based on the universal male preference for a nubile -hourglass- body shape and the fact that women tend to accumulate body weight as they age, with the result that relative thinness is a reliable cue of youth and reproductive potential. The second component is specific to modern societies: as fertility declines and the age of reproduction shifts upward, women tend to retain an attractive nubile shape for longer, which increases the importance of thinness as an attractive display. At the same, a number of converging trends contribute to intensify real and perceived mating competition among women, especially for long-term partners. Specifically, socially imposed monogamy reduces the number of available men; urban living dramatically increases the number of potential desirable competitors; and the media paint a visual landscape full of unrealistically thin, attractive women. The net outcome of these social changes is a process of runaway sexual competition that leads to an exaggerated desire for thinness in girls and women. Ironically, the process is largely driven by female intrasexual competition rather than direct male choice, and the resulting -ideal body- may be too thin to be maximally attractive to men.

In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.

RESISTANCE TRAINING SHOULD HAVE BEEN INVENTED FOR WOMEN. The fitness industry has been plagued with more myths than ancient Greece. One of the most glaring is that women who weight train will look like Mr. Universe. There are still many women who are sidetracked by this common misperception, thereby avoiding weights altogether and bypassing the opportunity to achieve a beautiful, shapely body. One of the biggest differences between men and women is their hormone levels and how these hormones behave—most specifically, testosterone. Testosterone bulks up muscle mass in most men. Men have significantly higher testosterone levels than women, and therefore increasing muscle mass for men is much easier. The vast majority of women cannot build huge, bulging muscles because they have a tiny fraction of the testosterone found in men. There are so many benefits to resistance training for both men and women, but the some of the benefits are very specific to women’s health. For women, the truth is that resistance training increases your metabolism so that you burn fat more easily (and women tend to carry more body fat than men), you build bone mass and prevent osteoporosis (which affects more women than men), and you balance your hormones (which tend to fluctuate wildly in women as they age). Also, women who do resistance training feel a boost in self-esteem and gain renewed physical and mental strength because of their new sexy shape. Resistance training is a woman’s best friend. I rest my case.

Trash first. Then supplies. Stepping forward, I kicked a pile of takeout containers to one side, wanting to clear a path to the cabinets so I could look for latex gloves. But then I stopped, stiffening, an odd scratching sound coming from the pile I’d just nudged with my foot. Turning back to it, I crouched on the ground and lifted a greasy paper at the top of the mess. And that’s when I saw it. A cockroach. In Ireland. A giant behemoth of a bug, the likes I’d only ever seen on nature programs about prehistoric insects. Okay, perhaps I was overexaggerating its size. Perhaps not. Honestly, I didn’t get a chance to dwell on the matter, because the roach-shaped locust of Satan hopped onto my hand. I screamed. Obviously. Jumping back and swatting at my hand, I screamed again. But evil incarnate had somehow crawled up and into the sleeve of my shirt. The sensation of its tiny, hairy legs skittering along my arm had me screaming a third time and I whipped off my shirt, tossing it to the other side of the room as though it was on fire. “What the hell is going on?” I spun toward the door, finding Ronan Fitzpatrick and Bryan Leech hovering at the entrance, their eyes darting around the room as though they were searching for a perpetrator. Meanwhile, I was frantically brushing my hands over my arms and torso. I felt the echo of that spawn of the devil’s touch all over my body. “Cockroach!” I screeched. “Do you see it? Is it still on me?” I twisted back and forth, searching. Bryan and Ronan were joined in the doorway by more team members, but I barely saw them in my panic. God, I could still feel it. I. Could. Still. Feel. It. Now I knew what those hapless women felt like in horror movies when they realized the serial killer was still inside the house.

God’s Message to Women When I created the heavens and the earth, I spoke them into being.  When I created man, I formed him and breathed life into his nostrils. But you, woman, I fashioned after I breathed the breath of life into man because your nostrils are too delicate.  I allowed a deep sleep to come over him so I could patiently fashion you.  Man was put to sleep so he could not interfere with the creativity. From one bone I fashioned you, and I chose the bone that protects man’s life.  I chose the rib, which protects his heart and lungs and supports him as you are meant to do.  Around this one bone, I shaped and modeled you. I created you perfectly and beautifully.  Your characteristics are as the rib, strong yet delicate and fragile.  You provide protection for the most delicate organ in man, his heart.  His heart is the center of his being; his lungs hold the breath of life.  The rib cage will allow itself to be broken before it will allow damage to the heart.  Support man as the rib cage supports the body.  You were not taken from his feet to be under him, nor were you taken from his head to be above him.  You were taken from his side to be held close as you stand beside him. I have caressed your face in your deepest sleep. I have held your heart close to Mine. Adam walked with Me in the cool of the day and yet he was lonely. He could not see or touch Me but could only feel My presence.  So I fashioned in you everything I wanted Adam to share and experience with Me: My holiness, My strength, My purity, My love, My protection and support. You are special because you are an extension of Me.  Man represents My image–woman My emotions. Together, you represent the totality of God. So man, treat woman well. Love and respect her, for she is fragile.  In hurting her, you hurt Me. In crushing her, you only damage your own heart. Woman, support man.  In humility, show him the power of emotion I have placed within you.  In gentle quietness show your strength.  In love, show him that you are the rib that protects his inner self. —Author Unknown

She let herself be had. With two women in the room behind her and her staff wandering the halls, she relaxed into his hold and returned his kiss. He tasted of the tea, of the sweetness of sugar; he tasted like a very bad idea that she would soon regret, but not now. Never now, while he kissed her yet. His hand skimmed down her body, shaping her breast. She opened her eyes and discovered him watching her, so blue his eyes were, and his palm over her stiffening nipple suddenly seemed to carry a message, too. The audacity of his touch, paired with the frank boldness of his look, made her laugh from sheer delight. She felt him grin against her mouth. His hand slipped farther yet, seizing her by the waist and pulling her more solidly against him. Her joints felt like melting waxworks, incapable of supporting her. She flung her arms around him and let him have all of her weight—and hit the wall harder yet as he stepped straight into her. Now she was doubly pinned, the tight, taut planes of his body as unyielding as the plaster behind her. Again he kissed her, harder yet, as though trying to convince her of something. What? What was the aim of his persuasion? She kissed him back eagerly, for did he not see? She was already convinced. She found his hair, soft and a touch too long, where it brushed against his collar. The skin beneath was hot and smooth. Her palm wrapped around his nape, and as she gripped him, she shuddered. This need felt elemental. Like hunger or thirst. From the entry hall far below came the sound of voices. They froze. Her eyes snapped open. His were so very, very blue. Someone would see them. They stood in plain view. His face turned into her neck. She heard, felt, the great breath he drew. Very low, against her skin, the roughness of his jaw abrading her, he spoke. “Friendship is not what I want.” Her hands broke free of her caution. They found his back, gathering in handfuls the soft wool of his jacket. Think. There were reasons, very good reasons, to discourage him. Money: he had none. Power: he had too much over her. He simply didn’t realize it.

In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon… soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered - look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes - or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors - the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit - well, son, your possibilities, as unrealised as the erections of your penis - in a moment - soon - will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered - not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us.

What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again. Life had been so kind as to reveal the whole extent of this young girl’s life, had lent first one optical instrument, then another, to see her with, and then added to carnal desire the accompaniment, multiplying and diversifying it, of other desires, more spiritual and less easily satisfied, which lie inert and unaffected when it is merely a question of the conquest of a piece of flesh, but which, when they want to gain possession of a whole field of memories from which they have felt nostalgically exiled, surge up wildly around carnal desire, extend it, are unable to follow it to the fulfillment, the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it is sought, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire halfway and, the moment the memory of it returns, are there to escort it once more; to kiss, not the cheeks of the first woman who comes along—anonymous, devoid of mystery and glamour, however cool and fresh those cheeks may be—but those of which I had so long been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the savor, of a color I had so often contemplated. One sees a woman, a mere image in life’s scene, like Albertine silhouetted against the sea, and then it becomes possible to detach that image, bring it close, and gradually observe its volume, its colors, as though it had been placed behind the lenses of a stereoscope. For this reason, women who tend to be resistant and cannot be possessed at once, of whom indeed it is not immediately clear that they can ever be possessed at all, are the only interesting ones. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them is to make the human image vary in shape, in size, in relief, a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman’s body, a joy to see anew when it has regained its slender outline against the backdrop of reality. Women who are first encountered in a brothel are of no interest, because they remain static.

Easing Your Worries I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? —MATTHEW 6:25     I don’t know how things are in your world, but I can tell you that in Southern California we live in an age of anxiety. My neighbors and I have it much easier than our parents, but we certainly are much uneasier than our parents were. We seem to be anxious about temporal things, more so than past generations. They never worried about whether they were eating at the new vogue eatery, vacationing at the best island hotel with the largest pool, wearing the most prestigious label, or keeping their abs in shape. I watched the previous generation closely; they wanted a home for their families, a car that ran efficiently, and a job that provided for their basic needs. It seems our main concerns and drives today are physical and earth possessed. A large number of people actually believe that if they have the best food, clothing, education, house, and trainer, they have arrived. What else could one want for a perfect life? Our culture actually places more importance on the body and what we do with it than ever before in modern history. Thus we have created a mind set that causes us as women to be more concerned with life’s accommodations along life’s journey than with our final destination. Many women are going through their lives with a vast vacuum on the inside. In fact, the woman that you might sometimes envy because of her finely dressed family and newly remodeled kitchen is probably spending most of her day anxious and unsatisfied. Maybe that woman is you? This thing called life is more important than food, and the body is more important than what we wear. All the tangible distractions don’t satisfy the soul; they have become cheap substitutes for our spiritual wholeness and well-being. Let Christ help you overcome the anxieties of life. • Stop chasing the temporal things of life. Seek the kingdom of God as it is revealed in Jesus. Cast all your cares on Him. • Take your eyes off yourself and focus them on God first. Much of our anxieties are rooted in our self-centeredness. • Spend most of your prayer time praying for others.

The Artist His gift is the ability to deeply see a woman. There are men who truly see women and men who see only what they want in women. The latter don’t get a lot in return. If you see only a body or a shell when you look at a woman, what would inspire her to share the gift of her innermost self? Remember, a woman thrives on being seen and known; a void of this reflection and caring leaves her feeling empty, unfulfilled, and resistant to you.  The Poet His gift is his capacity to give voice to what he sees. You might see a woman’s feminine essence, her unique beauty, and her inner beauty; but if you aren’t able to convey that to her, she won’t know or feel the depth of your love and desire. When you do choose to see and express who a woman is (at her essence) in words, you offer her a gift she cannot give to herself. Sure, she can know and cherish herself, but her feminine desire to be celebrated is different. “To be celebrated, honored, and valued with language and gesture” is a gift she cannot give herself. Note: The Artist and the Poet are clearly intertwined. Seeing and celebrating a woman are practically one in the same. And yet, one without the other leaves a void. Animate the Artist and the Poet together and feel inside you how deeply seeing a woman and being emotionally expressive with her unlocks your love and your power, and opens her. The Director His gift is the gift of direction – taking a woman somewhere she cannot take herself. The Artist and The Poet give shape to your loving, but without the forward motion and focus of the director, your relationship will lack directionality. The director takes a woman somewhere, sometimes literally, and sometimes within herself. Yes, a woman can direct herself; she has a masculine aspect. But your gift of directionality opens doorways, experiences, and feelings a feminine, flowing woman may never access on her own. Note: The Director and The Poet are natural partners. Giving voice to what you see and know about a woman builds trust. She relaxes. The Poet opens a woman’s desire to let go and turn herself over to a man’s directionality. Without this, The Director will meet with resistance. Remember, following is a choice. Letting go with you is a choice. A woman follows a confident dancer; she resists a weak one. Let her know you see and understand her, and she will open to your lead.

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.

Christopher’s attention was brought back abruptly to the little wild thing he had caught. In a frenzied effort to gain her release, she clawed his face with raking nails and sought to tear the hair from his head with grasping fists. He was hard pressed to defend himself until he caught the flailing arms firmly in his grasp and pressed them down, using his greater weight to subdue the Lady Saxton. Erienne was trapped, held firmly in the middle of the dusty road. Her outraged struggles had loosened her hair and disarranged her clothes to the point that her modesty was savaged. Her coat had come open in the scuffle, and their shirts were twisted awry, leaving her bosom bare against a hard chest. The meager pair of breeches made her increasingly aware of the growing pressure against her loins. She was pinned almost face to face with her captor, and even though the visage was shadowed, she could hardly miss the fact of his identity or the half-leering grin that taunted her. “Christopher! You beast! Let me go!” Angrily she struggled but could not influence him with her prowess. His teeth gleamed in the dark as his grin widened. “Nay, madam. Not until you vow to control your passion. I fear before too long I would be somewhat frayed by your zealous attention.” “I shall turn that statement back to you, sir!” she retorted. He responded with an exaggerated sigh of disappointment. “I was rather enjoying the moment.” “So I noticed!” she quipped before she thought, then bit her lip, hoping he might mistake her meaning. He didn’t. He was most aware of the effect her meagerly clad body had on him, and he replied with laughter in his voice. “Though you may choose to fault my passions, madam, they’re quite honestly aroused.” “Aye!” she agreed jeeringly. “By every twitching skirt that saunters by!” “I swear, ’tis not a skirt that attracts me now.” Holding her wrists clasped in one hand, he moved his hand down along her flank and replied in a thoughtful tone, “ ’Tis more like a pair of boy’s breeches. What? Has my ambush yielded me a stable boy?” Erienne’s indignation found new fuel that he could so casually fondle her, as if he had a perfect right. “Get off, you… you… ass!” It was the most damaging insult she could think of at the moment. “Get off me!” “An ass, you say?” he mocked. “Madam, may I point out that asses are to be ridden, and at the moment you are bearing my weight. Now, I know women are made to bear— usually their husbands or the seed they plant— but I would not suggest that you have the shape or looks even approaching an ass.” She ground her teeth in growing impatience at his wont to turn the simplest comment into an exercise of his wit. She could not bear the bold feel of him against her another moment. “Will you get off me?!” “Certainly, my sweet.” He complied as if her every wish was his command. Lifting her to her feet, he solicitously dusted her backside. -Erienne & Christopher

With great care, Amy opened the cellar door. With ladylike demeanor, she descended the stairs. And as her reward, she had the satisfaction of catching His Mighty Lordship sitting on the cot, his knee crooked sideways and his ankle pulled toward him, cursing at the manacle. “I got it out of your own castle,” she said. Northcliff jumped like a lad caught at a mischief. “My . . . castle?” At once he realized what she meant. “Here on the island, you mean. The old ancestral pile.” “Yes.” She strolled farther into the room. “I went down into the dungeons, crawled around in among the spider webs and the skeleton of your family’s enemies—” “Oh, come on.” He straightened his leg. “There aren’t any skeletons.” “No,” she admitted. “We had them removed years ago.” For one instant, she was shocked. So his family had been ruthless murderers! Then she realized he was smirking. The big, pompous jackass was making a jest of her labors. “If I could have found manacles that were in good shape I’d have locked both your legs to the wall.” “Why stop there? Why not my hands, too?” He moved his leg to make the chain clink loudly. “Think of your satisfaction at the image of my starving, naked body chained to the cold stone—” “Starving?” She cast a knowledgeable eye at the empty breakfast tray, then allowed her lips to curve into a sarcastic smile. “You’d love a look at my naked body, though, wouldn’t you?” He fixed his gaze on her, and for one second she thought she saw a lick of golden flame in his light brown eyes. “Isn’t that what this is all about?” “I beg your pardon.” She took a few steps closer to him—although she remained well out of range of his long arms. What are you talking about?” “I spurned you, didn’t I?” What? What What was he going on about? “You’re a girl from my past, an insignificant debutante I ignored at some cotillion or another. I didn’t dance with you.” He stretched out on the cot, the epitome of idle relaxation. “Or I did, but I didn’t talk to you. Or I forgot to offer you a lemonade, or—” “I don’t believe you.” She tottered to the rocking chair and sank down. “Are you saying you think this whole kidnapping was done because you, the almighty marquees of Northcliff, treated me like a wallflower?” “It seems unlikely I treated you as a wallflower. I have better taste than that.” He cast a critical glance up and down her workaday gown, then focused on her face. “You’re not in the common way, you must know that. With the proper gown and your hair swirled up in that style you women favor—” He twirled his fingers about his head—“you would be handsome. Perhaps even lovely.” She gripped the arms of the chair. Even his compliments sounded like insults! “We’ve never before met, my lord.” As if she had not spoken, he continued, “but I don’t remember you, so I must have ignored you and hurt your feelings—” “Damn!” Exploding out of the chair, she paced behind it, gripping the back hard enough to break the wood. His arrogance was amazing. Invulnerable! “Haven’t you heard a single word I’ve said to you? Are you so conceited you can’t conceive of a woman who isn’t interested in you as a suitor?” “It’s not conceit when it’s the truth.” He sounded quite convinced.

As a self-confessed Pre-Raphaelite - a term that by the 1880s was interchangeable with ‘Aesthete’ - Constance was carrying a torch whose flame had ben lit in the 1850s by a group of women associated with the founding Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters. Women such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris, the wives respectively of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, designer and socialist William Morris, had modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite artists, wearing loose, flowing gowns. But it was not just their depiction on canvas that sparked a new fashion among an intellectual elite. Off canvas these women also establised new liberties for women that some twenty years later were still only just being taken up by a wider female population. They pioneered new kinds of dresses, with sleeves either sewn on at the shoulder, rather than below it, or puffed and loose. While the rest of the female Victorian populace had to go about with their arms pinned to their bodies in tight, unmoving sheaths, the Pre-Raphaelite women could move their arms freely, to paint or pose or simply be comfortable. The Pre-Raphaelite girls also did away with the huge, bell-shaped crinoline skirts, held out by hoops and cages strapped on to the female undercarriage. They dispensed with tight corsets that pinched waists into hourglasses, as well as the bonnets and intricate hairstyles that added layer upon layer to a lady’s daily toilette. Their ‘Aesthetic’ dress, as it became known, was more than just a fashion; it was a statement. In seeking comfort for women it also spoke of a desire for liberation that went beyond physical ease. It was also a statement about female creative expression, which in itself was aligned to broader feminist issues. The original Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood lived unconventionally with artists, worked at their own artistic projects and became famous in the process. Those women who were Aesthetic dress in their wake tended to believe that women should have the right to a career and ultimately be enfranchised with the vote. […] And so Constance, with ‘her ugly dresses’, her schooling and her college friends, was already in some small degree a young woman going her own way. Moving away from the middle-class conventions of the past, where women were schooled by governesses at home, would dress in a particular manner and be chaperoned, Constance was already modern.

These studies compare women who choose hospital birth with those who try to deliver at home (regardless of whether they have their babies there or end up transferring to hospital for pain relief or medical intervention). It turns out that simply by choosing home birth, women are less likely to require drugs to induce or speed up labor or relieve pain; less likely to be cut open or to tear; and less likely to need a C-section or instrumental delivery. Their babies are born in better shape and are more likely to breastfeed.

He sat on the edge of the mattress, his nerves sizzling as Daisy gathered up the loose folds of her nightgown. She crawled into his lap with the delicacy of a cat. The scent of sweet female skin filled his nostrils, and her weight settled on his thighs. Linking her slender arms around his neck, she said gravely, “I missed you.” His palms charted the shape of her body; the tender curves, the slender waist, the firm heart-shaped bottom. But as enchanting as he found Daisy’s physical charms, they didn’t affect him a fraction as intensely as the warm, lively intelligence of her nature. “I missed you too.” Daisy’s fingers played in his hair, the delicate touch sending jolts of pleasure from the base of his skull to his groin. Her voice turned provocative. “Did you meet many women in Bristol? Westcliff mentioned something about a dinner, and a soirée given by your host—” “I didn’t notice any women.” Matthew found it hard to think over the exquisite writhing desire. “You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted.” She touched the tip of her nose to his in a playful nudge. “You weren’t celibate in the past, however.” “No,” Matthew admitted, closing his eyes as he felt the caress of her breath against his skin. “It’s a lonely feeling, wishing the woman in your arms was someone else. Not long before I left New York, I realized that every woman I’d been with in the past seven years had resembled you in some way. One would have your eyes, another your hands, or your hair…I thought I would spend the rest of my life searching for little reminders of you. I thought—” Her mouth pressed against his, absorbing the raw confession.

More often than not, the ideal breast is an invented breast. Decolletage, the tushy breast, is an artifact of clothing. Naked breasts don't dance cheek to cheek--they turn away from each other. Breasts vary in size and shape to an outlandish degree, but they can be whipped into an impressive conformity, and because we are human and we can't leave anything alone, we have whipped away.

It was clearly stated by Drs. Lacasse and Leo in their 2005 paper: “These advertisements present a seductive concept, and the fact that patients are now presenting with a self-described ‘chemical imbalance’ shows that the [advertising] is having its intended effect: the medical marketplace is being shaped in a way that is advantageous to the pharmaceutical companies.

My lady—” Lock began but Kat held up a hand. “Okay, I just have to say this. Before we go any farther, could both of you please stop calling me ‘my lady?’ It’s getting really old. We’re not at the freaking Renaissance Fair, you know. I mean, what’s next? Are you going to offer to buy me a tankard of mead and joust for my honor?” Both the brothers looked thoroughly confused. “Buy you what?” Deep said. “What’s a joust?” Lock asked. Kat blew out a breath in frustration. “Never mind. The point is, I want you to stop calling me ‘my lady.’ All right?” Lock frowned. “But it’s the only proper term of address for an elite female.” Kat had a feeling she was getting in deeper and deeper, but she couldn’t help asking. “What’s an elite female?” Lock’s dark brown eyes were suddenly as hot as his brother’s had been earlier when he’d scented her. “One with a shape like yours, my lady.” His big hands described a generous hourglass in the air. “Most of the females on Twin Moons are lean and tough—our lifestyle and diet make them that way.” “But there are a few,” Deep went on, taking up where his brother had left off. “A lucky few whom the Mother has marked with curving hips and ripe breasts, full to overflowing.” His black eyes flickered hungrily over her body as he spoke and Kat had to fight the urge to cover herself. She suddenly felt naked under the blue silk gown. “They are blessed by the Mother—goddesses who walk among us. We call them the elite,” Lock continued, still eyeing her. “And naturally we thought you were an Earth elite. Were we wrong?” Kat stared at them, unbelieving. “Uh, I guess so. But on Earth we call it ‘plus sized.’” “Plus sized?” Deep raised an eyebrow at her. “You know—more to love? Pleasingly plump? Big beautiful woman?” His eyes gleamed. “Most intriguing. I like all those descriptions.” “I do, too.” Lock gave her a ravenous look. Kat felt the sudden urge to pinch herself. Are they seriously saying they come from a planet of skinny-minnies but they think plus sized girls are hotter? Did somebody slip me some crazy pills? She shook her head, trying to clear away the mental images the brothers’ words brought to mind. “Look,” she said sternly. “It’s great you’re so into women with curves, but we are getting way, way, way off point here. One, I’d prefer if you just called me Kat. And two, we need to do this…whatever it is we’re going to do and try to locate Sophie and Sylvan. They’ve been missing for hours now.” “Very

When God described your body as a temple, He wasn't kidding. Show your respect for God's Word by keeping your temple in tip-top shape.