Laura Benanti Quotes

What's the biggest commercial for aggression, sexuality and materialism? What gets pumped into these kids' heads? Taking someone else's girl, which is so laissez-faire in hip-hop, will get you killed in the streets, but it doesn't seem to be an issue when you hear it on the radio.

So many images are saying to girls, 'Show a lot of skin and look gorgeous and sexy.'

I think people are learning to actually aspire to be objectified.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of confusion today over what is sexy and what is vulgar. It's horrifying. They say, 'Oh, that girl is so sexy,' and she turns around and the dress is four sizes too small. Or she's wearing so much stuff, you wonder how long it took her to get ready.

Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.

If you were an alien who came to our bookstores - or browsed our teen magazines - you'd think that only Earth girls who look like Mila Kunis ever got any action.

Mothers don't let your daughters grow up to be models unless you're present.

It's disconcerting that there's been this weird business model focused on teenaged boys, and it comes with a completely unexamined social cost. I hope there's an awareness happening to create an audience habituated to seeing women as they really are, rather than just a masticated shadow.

There's definitely a romanticism of youth, like, everywhere. Specifically with women, they kind of only exist between the age of 15 to 25.

You know, it really doesn't matter what the media write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass.

The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges.

Pop stars are sending the message that their sexuality is the strongest thing they have to offer, and that's confusing and misleading to girls and women, especially since there's not enough of a counterbalance from those who rely on their other assets, like their music. Also, with the new obsession with all things "booty," it's important that women - and it's often women of color - aren't turned into mere caricatures. Right now it's: "Bend over." That's all people want to see. That's crazy. It's so far from where we should be.

I know [my breasts] have opened doors for me, let’s be real.

All I can say is that when millions of plastic dolls of you are being sold each day and an equal number of teenage boys are masturbating over you each night, it's bound to do something screwy to your psyche.

Pretty That's what I am, I guess. I mean, people have been telling me that's what I am since I was two. Maybe younger. Pretty as a picture. (Who wants to be a cliché?) Pretty as an angel. (Can you see them?) Pretty as a butterfly. (But isn't that really just a glam bug?) Cliché, invisible, or insectlike, I grew up knowing I was pretty and believing everything good about me had to do with how I looked. The mirror was my best friend. Until it started telling me I wasn't really pretty enough.

We're all already aware of boobies; it is the general state of most people in North America! THANKS, MEDIA AND THE MALE GAZE

I wanted to retire from all that, but I guess my breasts still have a career, and I'm just tagging along with them.

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning.

Oh my God, so many young girls now look like whores!

If a girl is pretty she will be tempted.

I know a lot of people who are 12 and doing things they shouldnt be doing. Whether youre an actress or a singer, its always the sexier ones that are selling more tickets or selling more albums.

In life's rich beauty pageant we put children on a stage, said flash your soft white belly child, but just don't act your age.

I think that's the biggest misconception - that in order for me to be sexy I have to make sure my boobs are out.

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.

I can remember years ago, when Kate Moss first came around and there were so many articles. Everyone was saying that it was heroin chic - that she was a waif, that she was anorexic. But Kate would eat just as much as anybody I knew - the media had just turned her into this thing. It must be really, really hard when you're the object of that.