Top 150 Naomi Wolf Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Maybe the less pain we inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us.”

— Naomi Wolf

52. “There was a bad patch in the ’80s and early ’90s when feminist thinking had become sort of a monopoly and had developed a series of litmus tests.”

— Naomi Wolf

53. “Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well. The piled plate, the choicest cut, say: We think you’re worth this much of the tribe’s resources.”

— Naomi Wolf

54. “The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her “beauty.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

56. “We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution. As women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it waned to carry on its work of social control.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

59. “Women’s writing is full... of heartbreak with the injustices done by beauty – its presence as well as its absence.”

— Naomi Wolf

60. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

63. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

64. “Images of strangled women, women in cages do not push any limits; they are a mainstream cliche of a mainstream social order. Rock music fails to live up to its subversive tradition when it eroticizes the same old establishment sadomasochism rather than playing with gender roles to make us look at them afresh.”

— Naomi Wolf

65. “There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

67. “Citizens who live or work near protest sites or marches have every right to be free of violence from protesters, and they should never be subjected to destruction of property.”

— Naomi Wolf

68. “The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.”

— Naomi Wolf

69. “The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty’s sacraments glow brighter than ever. As women are inundated with claims on their time, ritual products give them an alibi to take some private time for themselves. At their best they give women back a taste of mystery and sensuality to compensate them for their days spent in the harsh light of the workplace.”

— Naomi Wolf

70. “Let me use a second metaphor. Imagine that you found a tangle of seaweed on the edge of the shore and lifted it. The heaviest parts rest on the sand in a mesh, but some skeins extend vertically. This neural network is shaped like that: it looks like a tangled skein of a hundred thousand golden threads that has been drawn upward. The mass of it gathers in the pelvis, but strands from the same network extend upward to the spinal cord and brain.”

— Naomi Wolf

71. “How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?”

— Naomi Wolf

72. “Women are told for so long that our feelings – our internal sensations of pain, pleasure, joy, sadness, or anger – are too much, or wrong, or bad. So eventually we can’t stop thinking and thinking about these problems, trying to think them out, but we stop feeling our feelings about them.”

— Naomi Wolf

73. “In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women’s identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too ‘pretty,’ she’s a threat, a rival – or simply not serious; if derided as too ‘ugly,’ one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.”

— Naomi Wolf

74. “The Tea Party emerged from a laudably grassroots base: libertarians, fervent Constitutionalists, and ordinary people alarmed at the suppression of liberties, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama.”

— Naomi Wolf

75. “The beauty myth generates low self-esteem for women and high profits for corporations as a result.”

— Naomi Wolf

76. “Women will be free of the beauty myth when we can choose to use our faces and clothes and bodies as simply one form of self-expression out of a full range of others. We can dress up for our pleasure, but we must speak up for our rights.”

— Naomi Wolf

77. “Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance.”

— Naomi Wolf

78. “It is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the myth, one woman’s body is used to hurt another. Our faces and bodies become instruments for punishing other women, often used out of our control and against our will.”

— Naomi Wolf

79. “Become goddesses of disobedience.”

— Naomi Wolf

80. “The press doesn’t stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.”

— Naomi Wolf

81. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

82. “Sexuality follows fashion, which follows politics.”

— Naomi Wolf

83. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

84. “In a fascist shift, reporters start to face more and more harassment, and they have to be more and more courageous simply in order to do their jobs.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

86. “Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies.”

— Naomi Wolf

87. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

88. “Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.”

— Naomi Wolf

89. “Advertisers are the West’s courteous censors.”

— Naomi Wolf

90. “Among the many incredible things about your incredible pelvic nerve and its lovely multiple branches is that, as we saw, it is completely unique for every individual woman on earth – no two women are alike.”

— Naomi Wolf

91. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.′ Critic John Berger’s well-known quote has been true throughout the history of Western culture, and it is more true now than ever.”

— Naomi Wolf

92. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

93. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

94. “All labor systems that depend on coercing a work force into accepting bad conditions and unfair compensation have recognized the effectiveness of keeping that work force exhausted to keep it from making trouble.”

— Naomi Wolf

95. “The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they’re not gone.”

— Naomi Wolf

96. “Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women’s pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.”

— Naomi Wolf

97. “Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.”

— Naomi Wolf

98. “When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women’s faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? When someone discusses a woman’s appearance to her face, she can ask herself, is it that person’s business? Are the power relations equal? Would she feel comfortable making the same personal comments in return?”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

100. “Protesters should make their own media and not rely on mainstream media to cover them.”

— Naomi Wolf