Naomi Wolf Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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 or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures — doctors, priests, psychiatrists — tell us that what we feel is not pain.

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 it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

Naomi Wolf
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
Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

Naomi Wolf
Health makes good propaganda. 'Proof' that women's activities outside the home are detrimental to the health and welfare of themselves, their families and the country as a whole lent impetus, writes Ann Oakley, to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. The ovaries were seen as collective property rather than the woman's own business, as the face and body outline are seen today. Who can argue with health?

Naomi Wolf
You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.

Naomi Wolf
We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.

Naomi Wolf
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
A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Naomi Wolf
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
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
The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.

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
It has been said that each generation must win its own struggle to be free. -Robert F. Kennedy

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

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

Naomi Wolf
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
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
Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.

Naomi Wolf
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
The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.

Naomi Wolf
The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect.More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation.

Naomi Wolf
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.

Naomi Wolf
In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.

Naomi Wolf
Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

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

Naomi Wolf
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
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

Naomi Wolf
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 a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.

Naomi Wolf