Last summer, I read an incredible book that, a year later, has still be making profound impacts on how I see the world. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf is a fascinating look into the way we see beauty in our society, covering topics ranging from eating disorders to sexual violence, pornography, and mental health. As I was reading it, I wrote down certain quotes that really stood out to me, and I have made a list here of some of the most important take-aways I think Wolf has to offer:

1. "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history."

This analyzes the role of distracting people from real, systemic issues by introducing something that they are told requires their full and immediate attention. Wolf argues that, for women, dieting has become one such distraction; women are assaulted with an onslaught of femme body negativity in order to reroute their energy, directly or indirectly, away from continued achievements in the field of equal rights.

2. "Anorexia is spreading because it works."

Make no mistake, as someone who has suffered from and continues to fight anorexia every day, I could never imagine condoning any form of eating disorder. This quote is important because, whether we like it or not, Wolf is right. Prevalence of eating disorders has been increasing, and continues to increase today, precisely because it does what we are told is supposed to be done. You do lose weight when you starve yourself. You also lose various important bodily abilities, your peace of mind, and all too often your life, but the Beauty Myth tells us these things are expendable in the name of achieving "physical attractiveness."

3. "In the shift from magazine to video, their self-consciousness became three-dimensional."

In The Beauty Myth, Wolf spends a significant amount of time discussing how the porn industry and the beauty industry are intertwined, both with one another and with the rising number of eating disorder cases. What she concludes with this quote is that the advancement of the porn industry has ultimately given people increasingly unattainable goals for their bodies. With the advent of the Internet, especially, younger and younger people are being exposed to these higher-def standards of "beauty" through porn. What was once a 2-D picture that differed from your own pictures, is now a real-life model against which you can compare every bend, roll, and angle of your own physique.

4. "To be anorexic is to keep a close daily tally of a slow death; to be a member of the walking undead."

Eating disorders, like I mentioned in the first quote, take an enormous amount of sacrifice. They require energy. They require time. They require money. But most importantly, they require you. Wolf is on to something when she compares anorexic people to "the walking undead" (had this been published a few years later there might have been a Walking Dead reference in this section); both groups wander through life half-awake, both are afflicting with a life-draining disease, and both straddle the precarious place between life and death. The word "zombie" really captures how I felt most of the time when I was in a starvation-induced haze.

5. "The women's movement changed institutions enough to make them admit women, but not yet enough to change the maleness of power itself."

This quote should hit home with the die-hard feminists like myself all over, because in this new generation we know this truth all too well. Have you ever tried explaining sexism to someone and hear the response "But women can do pretty much anything now, how can sexism still exist?" Well, this quote is basically the answer. Even though women are now entering systems of power from which they were previously excluded, the concept of those systems has not changed. This is why working women have difficulty also having a family (women are expected to be the main caretakers of children even if they have a career) as well as why, as you go up the ladder of corporate prestige, you find fewer and fewer women in higher positions. Women are expected to adapt to the system, rather than the system accommodating people's differences.

6. "What would be masochism for a man has meant survival for a woman."

Think of all the policing, all the restricting, all the dieting that women are expected to do compared to men. Consider some of the food-related shows on television right now; what would the social response be if it was Woman vs. Food instead of Man vs. Food, where a woman makes a career out of taking restaurant challenges to eat gluttonous amounts of food in limited amounts of time? How does a woman's "overeating" differ in perception from a man's? Aside from food, other industries including makeup, fashion, and plastic surgery all find women in more personally violent roles than their male counterparts. My point is not that women do these things more than men (although statistics show they do), but rather that women are expected to take these extra measures to look "normal," while for men these things are only extra.