It surprises me that, even among my friends who see the deception in that image of women that all the media conspire to create, most of them haven't been able to escape it. So many of my women friends remain uncomfortable in their own skin, because of a failure to resemble the popular image of a good-looking woman. Why can't my friends, who are generally so wily and willful, just side-step the body-image bull when it charges?

Some alternate scenarios might explain this. Immersed completely in a masculine-centric culture, with books as your only exposure to feminism, no palpable community of feminist allies, it would be easy to fall prey to that ideal. Or, with a love-object in sight, who has many endearing qualities but who nonetheless evaluates women in terms of these attributes, it would again be easy to submit to the image, if only to woo that satisfaction. But all of my sharp feminist friends are part of healthy communities of men and women who support the recentering—or the explosion—of ideal body types. Why can't these healthy people just blow off the strangers who use such impractical standards to evaluate women?

During the 1920s, prim-and-proper family life was still very much the status quo. But in that "Progressive Era," there were tons and tons of people who believed in fornication, free love, same-sex love, and tons of other pre vogue lifestyles; some of them lived in lively communities that shared their philosophy. In fact, their letters show that they took this for granted: it wasn't "our" private little rebellion—it was simply the better way, though most people hadn't accepted it. What did they think when they walked down the street, when they passed thousands of married people who would have balked at their progressive practices? They didn't bat an eyelash. They walked with a smirk. Who cares, after all, about five thousand strangers who haven't yet caught on to the idea of fornication?

Feminists today would need the same kind of impenetrable attitude. Most nightclubs will be filled with girls who will flaunt their skinny bellies and bat their made-up eyes. In the face of this conformity, should we be ashamed of fuller figures? Do they get in the way of the proper business of nightclubs (the brokering of flesh)? If we intend to camp in those woods, we should be ready to encounter the spirits that dwell there: the people who would carry, on their own bodies, the pixels of that image. And we should be ready to let those signals hiss past like missed arrows.