Julie Burchill Quotes

I was always reading those beauty magazines and wanting to become this unattainable thing.

Women spend their lives trying to look good for men. So a woman who feels she's sending the right visual signals is pleased with herself.

Not just as a black woman, but as a woman, since the beginning of time, beauty has been our responsibility.

I think we have become obsessed with beauty and personally I'm really saddened by the way women mutilate their faces today in search of that.

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.

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.

Thanks to capitalism, the importance placed on beauty has never been so manipulated. We are the guinea pigs force-fed ads that tell us how pathetic we are: that we will never be loved, happy or valuable unless we have the body, the face, the hair, even the personality that will apparently be ours, if only we buy their products.

I'm always suspicious of really beautiful women telling us we shouldn't be worried about beauty.

Something in the human psyche confuses beauty with the right to be loved. The briefest glance at human folly reveals that good looks and worthiness operate independently. Yet countless socializing forces, from Aunt Clara to the latest perfume ad, reinforce beliefs like 'If I were pretty enough, I would be loved.'

Anything looks good if you've got the body of a Victoria's Secret model and the porelessly smooth skin-tone of a piece of glass.

Not just in modeling, but in society, there's so much pressure about what a woman should be, and, of course, it's just so unobtainable. You can never become that thing, because it's such a projection.

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.

Society puts so much pressure on girls to look a certain way.

Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

Most women are dissatisfied with their appearance - it's the stuff that fuels the beauty and fashion industries.

I don't understand women who try to be glamour queens.

I learned the truth at seventeen, That love was meant for beauty queens, And high school girls with clear skinned smiles, Who married young and then retired.

Taylor Swift is so flawless, and so unattainable, and I don't think it's breeding anything good in young girls.

I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

I was essentially paid to perpetuate the myth that we are all, or should at least try to be, 17 and a size 2 forever.

We treat beauty like an accomplishment, and that is insane. Everyone in L.A. says, 'Oh, you look good,' and you listen for them to say you've lost weight. It's never 'How are you?' or 'You seem happy!'

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

By creating so many illusory images of physical perfection, whether on store aisles or storefront ads, magazine covers or TV shows, we speak more to the profit margins of companies than the self-esteem of today's girls.