Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill. .Naomi Wolf
About This Quote
In the 19th century, hypochondria was a major medical condition. People got sick from everything from minor conditions to serious diseases. In order to make people feel better and keep them from getting sick, doctors often diagnosed people with hypochondria and treated them accordingly. Symptoms that might be present in an actual disease were given to people who were just being picky about their food and exercise routine.
However, there was one specific symptom that women were blamed for having: walking around with an unnaturally shaped body. The idea of the Iron Maiden is that the female figure is supposed to be slender and graceful with little or no curves. This thought was so widespread that women were blamed for any deviation from the ideal shape.
And yet, this idea was so absurd it's pretty hard to blame women for feeling like monsters.
Source: The Beauty Myth
Some Similar Quotes
- You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection
- In youth, it was a way I had, To do my best to please. And change, with every passing lad To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know And do the things I do, And if you do not like me...
- You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and...
- That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>It's true, we're...
- It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
More Quotes By Naomi Wolf
- Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies, " two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external...
- You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.
- The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect. More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral...
- ...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.
- [The ideology of beauty] has grown strong to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for...