Home > Topic > the Iron Maiden
1 " Oh no, praying is great, without it the thumbscrews and the Iron Maiden probably never would have been invented. "
― Stephen King , Desperation
2 " Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.According to Appel, cult members develop..." an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. " Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is " beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: " I destroyed all my fat photographs!" ; " It's a new me! "
3 " 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. "
4 " Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her " Health" : if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth. "
