Quotes from Naomi Wolf

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

'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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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