You Live Here.

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Beauty ideals are internalized, rationalized, and socially legitimized: the ideology of beauty suggests that every woman can, and should, feel beautiful, presenting beauty as a democratic gender good akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet beauty codes make it clear that most women do not measure up aesthetically. Women are penalized for not being beautiful and at the same time are stigmatized, even pathologized, for not feeling beautiful, for having low self-esteem, for engaging in behaviors like dieting and excessive exercising, or for having eating disorders.