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Naomi Wolf Quotes | Quotes said by Naomi Wolf

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #1

    ...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.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #2

    A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #3

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

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #4

    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.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #5

    A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male ideal from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #6

    After we were hit on September 11, 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the U.S.A. Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #7

    Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #8

    An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth
    Galbraith offers an economic explanation for “the persistence of the view of homemaking as a ‘higher calling’”: the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, “has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

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

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #11

    At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an ideal be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not show on her body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #12

    Beauty and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be beautiful to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both beautiful and sexual constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #13

    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.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #14

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

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #17

    Camille Paglia is: 'the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #18

    Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women's dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out into the sexual marketplace are good for business in a consumer economy. Beauty pornography is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror's mercury, anti-erotic for both men and women.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #19

    Cosmetic surgery is not cosmetic, and human flesh is not plastic. Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: a nip, a tummy tuck....Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #22

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

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #23

    Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- fear societies and free societies, two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped.

    In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #24

    For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen. I am just much more likely to try to link essays to webcasts or videos. The best way for these two media to move forward, to inform and make change, is in tandem; together they are more than the sum of their parts.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #25

    For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #26

    For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #27

    Health makes good propaganda.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #28

    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.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #29

    Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.

  • Naomi Wolf Quote #30

    If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.

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