Marya Mannes Quotes

It's sad to hear that 1 in 3 girls have an eating disorder, because they're trying to be something that they think they need to be, when it's such a lie that they believe. Meanwhile all over the world there's people that are starving or dying of something crazy that we forget, and we think we're the only ones in this world.

To set the record straight, I’m not upset for me, but for all the girls out there that are struggling with their body image.

They tell us in magazines and in ads, 'Oh, you should look like this, you should wear this, you should look like this movie star, or you're nothing.' And so we're all totally unsatisfied.

If a woman says, I am getting these breast implants to gain self confidence, then I have to ask, What kind of a society do we live in where a woman's self-confidence depends on having a dangerous, expensive and painful operation on a perfectly healthy body?

Throughout their lives, women try to pummel their bodies into some phantom ideal shape that exists only with a lot of airbrushing. ... I don't blame men for this. Men seem to go for us no matter what size and shape we are. I blame capitalism. No, really. The consumer must constantly be in a state of anxious low self-esteem so that she will constantly buy lipsticks and girdles to make her feel cuter.

Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.

I was always a little bit chubbier than everyone else. But I would feel pain for some of the other girls, who were so young and felt they had to be so skinny. They'd be living in the model apartments, totally wrapped up in this whole world. And it made me more sad than anything.

The chief excitement in a woman's life is spotting women who are fatter than she is.

In this business, there is an insane amount of pressure, spoken and unspoken, to be thin. If you look at some of the television shows, eating disorders become like a competitive thing.

I think there's so much feeling among young girls where they feel like they have to be this perfect thing - and they don't. Perfect people don't exist. Sometimes people need to be told it.

American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious.

A significant number of women who have been ill or had marital issues feel they have no value, and society is so keen on telling us that's the case.

If you decide to tell a kid that looks don't matter, she can prove you wrong every day. Because they see it everywhere. That is age-old, going back to the Greeks, but now we're bombarded nonstop.

With women, the way they look... it's the core of their self-esteem.

Fashion really is women's liberation in a lot of ways. Look at how many women in this country are depressed about how they look and how they think they have to look! It's really sad. And it's not about money.

My mum never told me that I was beautiful when I was a kid - and I didn't read magazines or watch MTV, so I had no real consciousness about it all.

It's incredibly difficult to keep a healthy body image in this business.

If you're not happy about how you look, you have to question how much self-love you have.

Ads featuring real women and real beauty are such a necessary component to offset the potentially dangerous programming out there for little girls.

With Instagram and Twitter, you're constantly looking at other people and comparing yourself to them, and it's just not beneficial. There is always going to be someone skinnier or prettier or with better skin, and that same girl you're looking at is comparing herself to someone else.

I'm a wonderful disaster. So are you. We're all a mess. We're in this culture that says take this pill and you'll be happy, go on this diet and you'll be thinner, have your teeth whitened, people will love you more.

The thing that really matters to me is well-being and happiness. Maybe it comes from knowing people who have tortured themselves trying to meet these strangely narrow and rigorous definitions of what our culture thinks is beautiful.

I feel like there's more to life then worrying about the way that you look.

We are living in a world where image is important and we feel the need to confirm to a standard of what beauty is and how beauty should look like. We look at the billboard, and feel something is lacking in us.

Words and images deeply impact the way we view our bodies, and the consequences can be very damaging.