Feminine Ideal Quotes

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts.

The constant pressure to be the perfect, ideal female - there's no such thing.

But where do we come up with this notion of a woman in which the less space you take up, the more you're worth?

My dissertation was on the idea of feminine-themed women's magazines, so like how the ideal woman is put across by women's magazines.

The fact is external feminine beauty is highly valued, and we are constantly given the message that a slamming body is the most valuable thing a woman can possess.

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.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

The message was always, 'It's good to be pretty, but don't look like you're trying to be pretty!' Inherent in that is a lot of misogyny, I think, because the implication is, 'You must work hard to achieve a feminine ideal for which society has nothing but contempt.'

I'm an athlete. I'm strong. I'm tough. And that's how women should be. That's how they should be built.

That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

More people saw me than saw Napoleon, Lincoln and Cleopatra. I was better known than Einstein and Picasso. ... I changed the fashion of two continents. The style of the Gay Nineties became the rage ... women were trying to walk and talk like me. Women became more sex-conscious - sex was out in the open and fun.

Never in my life have I been captivated by by anybody onscreen the way I was when I saw Audrey Hepburn for the first time. She's everything a woman should be.

The great majority of men are attracted to feminine women who do not possess the body type of Michael Phelps. Beyonce is desired not because of her 'diabolical femininity,' but simply because of her femininity.

Each woman is made to feel it is her own cross to bear if she can't be the perfect clone of the male superman and the perfect clone of the feminine mystique.

Francie looked at her legs. They were long, slender, and exquisitely molded. She wore the sheerest of flawless silk stockings, and expensively made high-heeled pumps shod her beautifully arched feet. "Beautiful legs, then, is the secret of being a mistriss," concluded Francie. She looked down at her own long thin legs. "I'll never make it, I guess." Sighing , she resigned herself to a sinless life.

Not that it was Twiggy's fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingenue face and straight hair.

The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

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.

At a certain period in time, the fashion industry was portraying this image of a totally unrealistic woman, women who are not allowed to be themselves.

Earth's noblest thing,-a woman perfected.

I've always had a booty even when I was a baby, and when I was in high school and was skinny, I still had the booty. In Hollywood's eyes, the perfect women has to be a stick figure, tall, blonde hair, with big boobs.

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.

Women in the 1950s were so much sexier. That's what I aspire to look like.

The suburban housewife - she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife - freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment.