Naomi Wolf Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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

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 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
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
We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women

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

Naomi Wolf
I did not imagine that pregnant women were 'naturally' any more sensitive or exalted than people in any other condition; only it seemed as if — perhaps because we are in such a twilight state, a melting down and reconstituting of the self — there was more opportunity to hear strains from what must be the other side, the moral music of the sphere.

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

Naomi Wolf
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.

Naomi Wolf
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.

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
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
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
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
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.

Naomi Wolf
The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

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

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
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
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
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
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
The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her 'beauty.' Her reproductive value, as the 'aesthetic' value of her face and body today, 'came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race.'

Naomi Wolf