Rachel Vorona Cote writes about how people use beauty to undermine the words of women:
I understood, as I continue to understand with distressing nuance, that too many men navigate the terror of women’s brilliance by reducing them to skin and bone. When a man’s argument, undressed of its trappings, is an effete protest against women articulating their views at all, his recourse becomes the condemnation of our bodies. Our words, they try to tell us, are meaningless against the overwhelming fact of our flesh.
