Naomi Wolf Quotes

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

Naomi Wolf

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Naomi Wolf

A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

Naomi Wolf

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

Naomi Wolf

Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.

Naomi Wolf

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

Naomi Wolf

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

Naomi Wolf

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

Naomi Wolf

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

Naomi Wolf

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

Naomi Wolf

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

Naomi Wolf

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.

Naomi Wolf

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.

Naomi Wolf

'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.

Naomi Wolf