Quotes from Naomi Wolf

Men are only in sexual competition when they are competing sexually, but the myth puts women in "sexual" competition in every situation. Competition for a specific sexual partner is rare; since it is not usually a competition "for men," it is not biologically inevitable.

Since middle-class women have been sequestered from the world, isolated from one another, and their heritage submerged with each generation, they are more dependent than men are in the cultural models to offer, and more likely to be imprinted by them. [...] Given few role models in the world, women seek them on the screen and the glossy page.

The way to instill social values, writes historian Susan G. Cole, is to eroticize them. Images that turn women into objects or eroticize the degradation of women have arisen to counterbalance women's recent self-assertion. They are welcome and necessary because the sexes have come too close for the comfort of the powerful [...]

Lad os være skamløse. Grådige. Opsøge fornøjelser. Undgå smerte. Klæde os, spise og drikke, som vi har lyst til. Være tolerante over for andre kvinders valg. Vælge den form for sex, vi har lyst til og kæmpe hårdt mod den form for sex, vi ikke har lyst til. Finde vore egne grunde til at handle, som vi gør.

As she put it more wearily in a later interview in New Woman, Advertisers don't believe in female opinion makers. Steinem believes that it's the advertisers who've got to change. And she believes they will, though perhaps not in her lifetime.

A girl learns that stories happen to beautiful women, whether they are interesting or not. And, interesting or not, stories do not happen to women who are not beautiful.

for women's magazines cannot become more interesting until women believe that we ourselves are more interesting—the myth is bound to become many times more powerful.

This ritual use of constant surveillance is a vivid example of the real motivation behind the myth: Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn't care about women's appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will be good, but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.

None of this is true. "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. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.

The code words will change with women's subconscious anxieties. But if women want out of an expensive belief system arranged to coerce us through these messages, we will read holy oil copy knowing that it is not about the product, but is an impressively accurate portrait of the hidden demons of our time.

The last thing the consumer index wants men 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, [...] What they sell is sexual discontent.

Beauty" is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman; the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts.

This point, where beauty forms the bridge between women and institutions, is what women are taught to seize upon, and is then used as proof that women themselves are finally to blame. But to make herself grasp this straw, a woman has to surpress what she knows: that the powerful ask for women to display themselves in this way.

What women look like is considered important because what we say is not.

Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing of the older rich men with young, "beautiful" women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E., the situation was reversed:

Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about "beauty" date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.

Women's magazines for over a century have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women's roles, and throughout that time—today more than ever—they have consistently glamorized whatever the economy, their advertisers, and, during wartime, the government, needed at that time from women.

Though many women realized that their attention was being focused in this way, fewer fully understood how thoroughly politically such focusing works: In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly.

A man's right to confer judgment on any woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given.

Of course, men don't age any better physically. They age better only in terms of social status. We misperceive in this way since our eyes are trained to see time as a flaw on women's faces where it is a mark of character on men's.

Tatiana Mamanova, a Soviet feminist, responding to a question about the difference between the West and Russia, replied, The pornography... it's everywhere, even on billboards... [it] is a different kind of assault. And it doesn't feel like freedom to me.

Thirty-five thousand dollars worth of advertising was withdrawn from a British magazine the day after an editor, Carol Sarler, was quoted as saying that she found it hard to show women looking intelligent when they were plastered in makeup.

sexual response is connected to and in turn generates a larger sense of pleasure, meaning, and interest in the world

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