In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30, 000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they'd rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite? In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one's true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied. Caroline Knapp
About This Quote

In the quest to get women to lose weight, we may be missing the point. The idea of losing weight is too narrow. Women are looking for something deeper, stronger, more complete. They want to find a strength women have always had, but have lost over time—a strength that will let them turn themselves inside out, so to speak, and with ease, without any sense of shame or trepidation. I suspect that the appetite for appetite is an underlying desire among many women at the start of the millennium: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one's true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied.

Source: Appetites: Why Women Want

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  1. In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30, 000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they'd rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue...

  2. And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex...

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  5. The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite–on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel–keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women...

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