Naomi wolf 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.

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.

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning.

Evolutionary biology is crazy because sometimes it seems anybody can draw any conclusion they want.

I'll go anywhere to talk about the Constitution. I believe in trans-partisan organizing around these issues.

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.

Why am I voting for Obama? Obama, of all the candidates, is the only one of the major candidates - even more than Hillary Clinton, when they were running against each other - to speak in favor of the defense of the Constitution and the separation of powers.

Historically, when a leader has deployed his own military against civilians, it's never been good. There's never been a time where it's ended well.

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.

There is this giant void in the culture about women in that age group as heroines, as romantic beings, as sexual beings and as creative beings, and there's not that void for men. Women don't stop being all those things as their lives continue into those decades.

Women's orgasms will quadruple in intensity if she's in a beautiful, dimly lit room versus a brightly lit, uncomfortable room.

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

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.

Maybe the less pain we inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.

From a constitutional point of view George W. Bush passing through the Patriot Act is no worse than Obama renewing it.

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.

I've never understood this puritanical idea that feminism has to be a cult. You know, we all have to think alike or dress alike or have a similar ideology.

George W. Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever. It is terrifying and the left doesn't seem to recognize it.

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.

It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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

To me, my version of feminism, it's co-extensive with human rights and democracy. It's just part of the same fight for everyone being free, and having autonomy and dignity. It's not pitting one gender against another, it's not saying anything is better, it's just clearing away injustice.

Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.

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.

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 USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.

Demographically, I'm a hippie from San Francisco and I'm not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power.

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.

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.

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

Health makes good propaganda.

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

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.

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.

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states - “fear societies” and “free societies.”… The two societies make up 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.

Even though I'm appalled when racism surfaces, and I personally don't agree with certain policy solutions and a lot of what they believe in, as someone who is very concerned about reinvigorating democracy the Tea Parties are an answer to what I asked for.

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

To find freedom and happiness in each others' arms, or you know, inside their own bodies and minds. That is a very empowering thing in a society that's trying to control us all the time.

People who have come of age from the '80s on have experienced a form of activism that's very sterile and annoying. It's not that much fun to be an activist. That's partly by design. They are sterile protests and anonymous e-mail activism - not the kind of thing where people fall in love, form friendships for life, and see the change they make right in front of them. I've seen that, when people start to experience doing these things together and the power that it has.

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

Since Reagan, it's almost impossible to get funding for research on sexual pleasure. You can find sexual behavior research, but not sexual pleasure. And let alone lesbian or homosexual sexuality.

When a leader has deployed a private army, that is one definition of a police state. Another is when the president, or a leader, has his own treasury.

Women who are beautiful or who achieve beauty according to the imposed standards are rewarded; those who cannot or choose not to be beautiful are punished, economically and socially.

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.

We need to get back into grappling with people we disagree with if we want to restore the Republic.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

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

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

Become goddesses of disobedience.

Conservatives' views of liberals are just as distorted as ours are of conservatives.

Al Gore was a good guy and he wanted to give flextime to American women who are trying to balance work and family, but he couldn't because the business interests are organized, and they don't want it to happen.

Our culture is a capitalist society right? And so in order to always have the idea of the good life, means something you pay money for. Think of being outside of what you have and own, it always has to be receiving a difference.

The '60s and '70s - I grew up in the Haight-Ashbury - people around me were going to school by day and all night long having these incredibly exciting meetings, mobilizing, marching, drafting statements. It was very intoxicating. It was very energizing. We've really forgotten a lot of those skills. Or they haven't been transmitted. It's useful to the people controlling us to have those skills not be available.

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.

There's been a systematic propagandizing of American citizens for 30 years to make us forget what America is supposed to be and what our rights are and what our system is and what our core principles are. And one of them since 1807 has been this right that the founding generation put in place, to make sure that military troops would never, ever, ever be deployed in the United States of America for civilian policing.

Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.

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.

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

I am worried that Americans I have met on my journey across the country, seem very hopeless and are feeling powerless to make change and are feeling passive. I'm not blaming them. But one thing we need at a time like this is for people to feel empowered and angry.

Of course a woman who decides to work full time as a mother in the home can be happy and deserves full respect from us. Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do. The goal is to remake the world so that our choices are not so stark.

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.

Don't sit around waiting for the two corrupted established parties to restore the Constitution or the Republic. The founding generation was birthed by the rabble of all walks of life that got fed up and did risky things because they were captivated by the breath of liberty. There is a looming oligarchy and it is up to the people to organize a grassroots movement and push back.

The reason I'm voting for Barack Obama is that it's either him or a police state - someone who's carrying on policies that are clearly stated and directed at subverting liberty. He's definitely the lesser of two evils.

We are in the midst of a violent backlash againist feminism that uses images of female beauty as political weapons against women's advancement.

I met Muslim immigrants in Brooklyn who were swept up in 9-11 raids, held in abusive conditions, beaten, denied rights. That's how things started in Germany. Guantanamo was modeled after what Stalin developed for the Gulag.

If the whole world is a battlefield, then the United States is also a battlefield.

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

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

Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well.

I don't want to overstate tantra because I'm sure there are scumbags everywhere, but it seems like it's an ideology that actually respects female desire.

I would like to trust and believe that the American spirit of resistance will win the day, but I keep having to be this downer Cassandra person in saying that without dismantling this horrific legislative apparatus that has basically given George W. Bush dictatorial power, the spirit of America is not enough. We have to have that spirit, but we have to have tactics and strategies and a movement and a victory.

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.

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.

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.

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.

The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.

A culture fixation 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.

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

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.

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.

“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.

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.

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

Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now.

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

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.

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.

Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - IS innately disruptive of “business as usual.” That is WHY it is effective.

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.

We need people to be alert and thinking for themselves and connected to each other and connected to that sense of hope and empowerment and radical chutzpah that the founding generation had and intended us to have.

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

I'm not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your Greenwich Village apartment. I'm worried about things like the McCain Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.

When people like Glenn Beck throw around the word Nazi without taking that kind of care, they are engaging in demagoguery. I am doing it with a concrete footnoted historical context.

Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop.

Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism.

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.

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

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.

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

When women are subordinate by their culture, in being able to anticipate or think about pleasurable sex, it boosts dopamine, which is about confidence and assertiveness and motivation and drive and focus. So that to me, explained why for 5,000 years female sexuality has been targeted.

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.

If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen.

I don't want people to be suicidal. I want them to be energized and angry.

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.

The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to fit her vision.

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

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

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.

Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.

The media needs to tell a story. And whenever there's a new generation, you know, with a new conversation, it's handy to say well, these are the angry young men, these are the hippies, these are the boomers.

I don't think we've got the concept in the West that male desire degrades men. Or that if men become sexually active, they become debased in some way, or slutty. Or lose status.

'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.

Sexiness is no longer defined just as whether we are desirable, but also what we desire. The more liberated women become - economically, politically, and personally - the more erotic we are. Freedom is a lot sexier than dependency.

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.