Mary Pipher Quotes

We are being accused that some models are anorexic. But we as fashion designers cannot be blamed, because you know, when I talk to women around the world, rich and poor and young and old and intellectual and not, what they want to be is skinny. You ask them, 'What is your dream?' It's to be skinny. That's all they want.

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

In LA, where I live, it's all about perfectionism. Beauty is now defined by your bones sticking out of your decolletage. For that to be the standard is really perilous for women.

Skinniness is a new fashion. It reflects an obsession with youth, a suggestion of pre-adolescence when a female's fertility can be dominated. It implies vulnerability, feebleness and fragility.

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

We know that ever woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.

I think that people are built the way that they’re built. There’s that Kate Moss quote that’s like ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ and I can name a lot of things that taste better than skinny feels: bread, potatoes … a Philly cheesesteak and fries.

There's a lot more to being a woman than being 18 years old on the cover of Maxim magazine.

A woman doesn't care if she hasn't a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn't.

In New York, if you weigh under 200 pounds and decline so much as a cookie at a co-worker's party, women will flock to your side, assuring you of your appealing physique. This is how skittish we are about the dangers of anorexia and the pressures of body image.

You're either too fat or too thin. You just can't win.

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.

There are stereotypes that have been out there for a long time that tell girls that their main asset, the main thing that they are valued for, is their appearance and also that it's to the exclusion of anything else.

The pressure to keep up with what society tells us is perfect is causing us to enter a time when women are no longer women, but plastic shells of what women used to be.

Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body - waiflike, angular - that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place a garish caricature, a cruel cartoon of flesh and bone.

I was very thin, like a boy, and I was very un-sexy.

I don't want to feel I'm responsible for anorexia across the country.

It's not right to believe that the only way you're gonna get a job and the only way you're gonna get a man or be happy is by being so skinny.

I don't think just being skinny means necessarily anorexic.

Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell's body and Madeleine Albright's career.

It's not attractive when girls get superskinny. Guys don't like it. Girls don't like you as much. You lose some happiness when that's all you think about.

The pressure on women to be thin is like a plague. I have gone through my life, like a lot of women, rating my experiences on the basis of, 'Was I thin at that time or fat?' And it doesn't seem to let up.

Outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in.

Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.