Advertising Quotes

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

Naomi Wolf

Health makes good propaganda.

Naomi Wolf

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.

Naomi Wolf

What editors are obliged to appear to say that want from women is actually what their want from women.

Naomi Wolf

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.

Naomi Wolf

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?

Naomi Wolf

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Peter Drucker

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

Naomi Wolf

Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.

Daniel Gardner

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.

Naomi Wolf

Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.

Naomi Wolf

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

Naomi Wolf

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.

Naomi Wolf

While it may be true that the best advertising is word-of-mouth, never lose sight of the fact it also can be the worst advertising.

Jef I. Richards

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.

Naomi Wolf

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

Naomi Wolf

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic

Samuel Johnson

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