Quotes from Naomi Wolf

Unfortunately, since the media routinely give accounts of women's appearance in a way that trivializes or discredits what they say, women reading or watching are routinely dissuaded from identifying with women in the public eye—the ultimate anti-feminist goal of the beauty myth.

It is not surprising that in the female narrative [of schizophrenics] the hectoring spirit…who jeers, judges, commands and controls…is almost invariably male. He delivers the running critique of appearance and performance that the woman has grown up with as part of her stream of consciousness.

Anorexics are sure they are embarked on a quest that no one else can understand by looking at them. Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.

Religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man's sexual pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as the circumcision knife into a woman's enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might otherwise experience.

The soulless blood-rush of synthesized climax over a repetitive backbeat made disco the perfect music by which to score with a stranger.

Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped.

A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights.

The harm is apparent in the way such imagery represses female sexuality and lowers women's sexual self-esteem by casting sex as locked in a chastity belt to which "beauty" is the only key.

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.

Even Barbie has been redesigned with a more realistic body type and now comes in many colors. Looking around, there is a bit more room today to be oneself.

The idea that a woman's body has boundaries that must not be violated is fairly new. We evidently haven't taken it far enough. Can we extend that idea? Or are women the pliable sex, innately dapted to being shaped, cut, and subjected to physical invasion? Does the female body deserve the same notion of integrity as the male body?

Is beauty really sex? Does a woman's sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she's a person, or must she earn that right through beauty, as she used to through marriage?

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a self-denying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round, men and women seated together; but the same traditional hierarchical dais, with a folding table for women at the foot.

In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women's skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.

O mito da beleza gera nas mulheres uma redução de amor-próprio, com o resultado de altos lucros para as empresas.

Todos os sistemas de trabalho que dependem da coação de uma mão de obra, forçando-a a aceitar condições más e remuneração injusta, reconheceram a eficácia de manter essa mão de obra exausta para impedir que ela se rebele.

An essential paradox of the female condition is that for women to really be free, we have to understand the ways in which nature designed us to be attached to and dependent upon love, connection, intimacy, and the right kind of Eros in the hands of the right kind of man or woman.

Are women beautiful or aren't we?

From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and "communist" academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation's premier artists and writers had fled as well.11 The Nazi periodical The Nettle depicted this emigration as "a triumph for the German nation."12

Os homens são estimulados visualmente pelo corpo feminino e são menos impressionáveis pela personalidade da mulher porque desde cedo são treinados para reagir assim, enquanto as mulheres são menos estimuladas em termos visuais e mais em termos emocionais por ser este o treinamento que recebem.

Beauty" today is what the female orgasm used to be: something given to women by men, if they submitted to their feminine role and were lucky.

Quando a romancista Margaret Atwood perguntou a mulheres o que elas mais temiam dos homens, elas responderam que tinham medo que eles as matassem. Quando fez a mesma pergunta aos homens com relação às mulheres, eles responderam que tinham medo que elas rissem deles.

Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are—less. We should identify it as Jews identify the death camps, as homosexuals identify AIDS: as a disgrace that is not our own, but that of an inhumane social order.

Pain is real when you can get other people to believe in it. If no one believes it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy.