Naomi Wolf Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Become goddesses of disobedience.

'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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