Every day pubescent girls and adult women across tis nation, rich and poor alike, are carving away at their bodies for the sake of beauty: tweezings, depilations, starvation diets, hair cuttings, hair permings, hair straightenings, facial scrubs and acid abrasions, nail whittlings and cuticle trimmings, liposuctions, excisions of bony tissue, breast jobs and hip jobs and nose jobs.  Are these commonplace acts that are consciously designed to repair and beautify the body unconscious self-mutilations, the equivalents of a body mutilation, a perversion?  Whenever living flesh, the living body, or part of a body is deadened into a fetishistic object, we must suspect the perverse strategy at work. 

(Kaplan, Female Perversions).

Nothing like a little light reading to study for my Sexual Disorders final this Tuesday.

Go Team Encouragement!