Naomi Wolf famous quotes

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

#Men #Long #Naked

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

#Beauty #Women #Independent

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

#Bad Ass #Mad #Political

A Mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually VACCINATES her daughter against low self-esteem.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Daughter #Mother #Self Esteem

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

#Cowboy #Enemy #Guilt

She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Beautiful #Winning #Challenges

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

#Beautiful #Salary #Mature

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.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Men #Long #Culture

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

#Men #Editors #Want

My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Jobs #Echoes #Scientist

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

#Encouragement #Pain #Real

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 something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Beautiful #Men #No Friends

Today, women have access to the technological capacity to do anything to our bodies in the struggle for "beauty", but we have yet to evolve a mentality beyond the old rules, to let them imagine that this combat among women is not inevitable. Surgeons can now do anything. We have not yet reached the age in which we can defend ourselves with an unwillingness to have "anything" done. This is a dangerous time. New possibilities for women quickly become new obligations.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Struggle #Age #Done

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

#Fashion #Imitation #Photograph

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

#Girl #Boys #Unique

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

#Self Esteem #Real #Equality

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

#Hurt #Self Esteem #Teaching

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

#Self Esteem #Men #Body

Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Kids #Thinking #Resilience

I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Attitude #Choices #Body

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Self Esteem #Names #Iron

Health makes good propaganda.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Propaganda #Fashion Industry

How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?
-- Naomi Wolf

#Men #Average #America

In a fascist shift, reporters start to face more and more harassment, and they have to be more and more courageous simply in order to do their jobs.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Jobs #Order #Faces

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

#Body Image #Sexuality

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

#Revolution #Enough #Wells

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

#Self Esteem #Mean #Sick

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Makeup #Long #Incentives

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

#Cutting #Space #Roles

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

#Men #Names #Clothes

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

#Mind #Culture #Body

The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Ideas #Skulls #Battle

What, after all, is the narrative of the American Dream? It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Dream #United States #Reform

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

#Broken #Justice #Female

The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Sex #Men #Would Be

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

#Writing #Self #Two

When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Country #Believe #Mean

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Criticism #Use #Language

When women breached the power structure in the 1980s?two economies finally merged. Beauty was no longer just a symbolic form of currency: it literally became money.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Two #Economy #Currency

For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen... together they are more than the sum of their parts.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Giving Up #Together #Video

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

#Pregnancy #Twilight #Opportunity

Democracy is disruptive... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Democracy #Politics #Disruption

Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Gold #Currency #Standards

It's human nature to abuse power, no matter who you are.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Abuse #Matter #Human Nature

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

#Pain #Real #Believe

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

#Lying #Moving #Men

a white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Country #Thinking #Race

Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Truth #Frightening

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

#Self #Justice #Feminist

What editors are obliged to appear to say that
-- Naomi Wolf

#Self Esteem #Editors #Esteem

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

#Self Esteem #Stronger #Rising

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

#Self Esteem #Workplace #Economic

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

#Powerful #Self Esteem #Broken

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

#Self Esteem #Body #Aging

Excellence, to me, is the state of grace that can descend only when one tunes out all the world's clamor, listens to an inward voice one recognizes as wiser than one's own, and transcribes without fear.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Voice #Grace #Excellence

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

#Self Esteem #Eye #Reflection

It is important to distinguish between the power of the Internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Real #Political #Important

In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of 'overpermiticisation' - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Government #America #Requirements

I am delighted to be joining 'Guardian U.S.''s team as a weekly columnist, and to have the chance to address American and global current events on its distinguished platform. 'Guardian U.S.' brings the 'Guardian''s hard-hitting investigative brand to a new focus on American news and opinion.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Team #Focus #Joining

From 1970 onwards, our culture told both sexes that individual expression was paramount. And for women, that was defined as the right to choose an interesting a career, a high-status mate, the desirable handbag or vacation, the perfect family size, and a definitionally fruitless quest for 'perfection.'
-- Naomi Wolf

#Sex #Vacation #Expression

Democracy is disruptive. Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for this, but there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. Protesters ideally should read Gandhi and King and dedicate themselves to disciplined, long-term, non-violent disruption of business as usual - especially disruption of traffic.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Kings #Long #Peaceful

Citizens who live or work near protest sites or marches have every right to be free of violence from protesters, and they should never be subjected to destruction of property.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Citizens #Violence #March

A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Organization #Internet #Grassroots

When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Baby #War #Feminist

There was a bad patch in the '80s and early '90s when feminist thinking had become sort of a monopoly and had developed a series of litmus tests.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Thinking #Feminist #Tests

The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.
-- Naomi Wolf

#America #President #Gone

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

#Usual #Firsts #Quiet

Since Madonna is positioned as always 'cooler than thou,' we all are primed for schadenfreude if something in her fabulous life goes amiss.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Fabulous #Schadenfreude

It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.
-- Naomi Wolf

#Strong #Smart #Democracy