Naomi Wolf Quotes
Naomi Wolf Quotes
...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.
4989Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
3585 A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
3540 What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
2516 She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.
1435 A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
1382 Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.
4020 To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual-and hence social-confidence while undermining that of women.
1588 No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.
4446 Health makes good propaganda.
1752 The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
1592 The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.
3567 Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.
3233 What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?
1875 The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.
Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.
1952 When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman-known, marked, lined, familiar - -who hands him the paper every morning.
4473 Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.
3361 Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.
1006 Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our "beauty" so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
1917 The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.
2146 Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.
1488 What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.
3137 As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.
1150 Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.
1280 If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.
2656 The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.
4347 The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.
3480 Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
3156 Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.
4967 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.
4709 Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.
3298 Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
1065 It seemed to me, watching, that if you were dextrous enough to gift-wrap an independent-minded amphibian, you could just about manage a condom.
1144 It has been said that each generation must win its own struggle to be free. -Robert F. Kennedy
1845 To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
2194 