Top 150 Naomi Wolf Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

103. “We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.”

— Naomi Wolf

104. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

105. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

106. “What editors are obliged to appear to say that.”

— Naomi Wolf

107. “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”.”

— Naomi Wolf

108. “Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital lies,” and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are destructive communal illusions.”

— Naomi Wolf

109. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

110. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

111. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

112. “It is dead easy to become an anorexic.”

— Naomi Wolf

113. “It is inconceivable to the dominant culture that it should respect as a political allegiance, as deep as any ethnic or racial pride, a woman’s determination to show her loyalty – in the face of a beauty myth as powerful as myths about white supremacy – to her age, her shape, her self, her life.”

— Naomi Wolf

114. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

115. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

116. “Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret “underlife” poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.”

— Naomi Wolf

117. “A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.”

— Naomi Wolf

118. “The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women’s faces and bodies.”

— Naomi Wolf

119. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

120. “For women to be urged to think continually of beauty’s fragility and transcience is a way to try to keep us subservient, by maintaining in us a fatalism that has not been part of Western men’s thinking since the Renaissance.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

122. “When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it.”

— Naomi Wolf

123. “As a child, you sat in a circle around your teacher and looked at her face as she read a story, and you felt the magic of human narrative in a collective context.”

— Naomi Wolf

124. “Stress affects each gender differently. In a kind of tragic misalignment, during a fight men tend to get “flooded” with stress hormones in a way that leads them to long to shut down, withdraw, and detach – the “flight or fight” response to adrenaline – in order to regain neuroendocrine equilibrium; whereas women react to the same stress by needing to talk more and connect more – the “tend and befriend” response, which lowers their own stress levels.”

— Naomi Wolf

125. “The job market refined the beauty myth as a way to legitimize employment discrimination against women.”

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

127. “The most emblematic working women in the West could be visible if they were “beautiful,” even if they were bad at their work; they could be good at their work and “beautiful” and therefore visible, but get no credit for merit; or they could be good and “unbeautiful” and therefore invisible, so their merit did them no good.”

— Naomi Wolf

128. “The problem with cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out exists only if women hate ourselves when we don’t. When a woman is forced to adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming in order to protect her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must attract a lover so that she can take care of her children, that is exactly what makes ‘beauty’ hurt.”

— Naomi Wolf

129. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

130. “Are women beautiful or aren’t we?”

— Naomi Wolf

131. “The inversion of female sexuality keeps women from being in control of their own sexual experience. One trouble with soft-core sexual imagery aimed at young men is that the women photographed are not actually responding sexually to anything: young men grow up trained to eroticize images that teach them nothing about female desire. Nor are young women taught to eroticize female desire. Both men and women, then, tend to eroticize only the woman’s body and the man’s desire.”

— Naomi Wolf

132. “An employer can’t prove an employee incompetent simply by announcing that she is. But because “beauty” lives so deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her feel ugly, act ugly, and, as far as her experience is concerned, be ugly, in the place where feeling beautiful keeps her whole.”

— Naomi Wolf

133. “An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An ideology that makes women feel “worth less” was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more.”

— Naomi Wolf

134. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

135. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

136. “How can woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women – compulsory marriage or prostitution – more politely and for half the pay.”

— Naomi Wolf

137. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

138. “It is all impersonal; it is political.”

— Naomi Wolf

139. “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”.”

— Naomi Wolf

140. “It profits women little if we gain the whole world only to fear ourselves.”

— Naomi Wolf

141. “We are relentlessly encouraged by tech companies to think of their technology as enabling human processes, making human actions more efficient. Do your bookkeeping better! Find a restaurant more easily! Talk to a loved one far away! In fact, the business models of most tech giants, and especially social media giants, most thrive when they have replaced human experience and human actions. And now they have moved on to suppressing human experience and human actions.”

— Naomi Wolf

142. “Little girls for lack of anything better learn from what comes to hand. They do not lack facts; they lack a positive sexual culture: novels and poetry, film and jokes and rock and roll, written not to sell but to explore and communicate and celebrate, as the best male erotic culture is written.”

— Naomi Wolf

143. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

144. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

145. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

146. “I would say that when what started as an outsider’s argument becomes the conventional wisdom of a Girl Scout troop, it is a sign of an evolution in conciousness.”

— Naomi Wolf

147. “In short, it was not commonly understood at that time that ideals didn’t simply descend from heaven, that they actually came from somewhere and that they served a purpose. That purpose, as I would then explain, was often a financial one, namely to increase the profits of those advertisers whose ad dollars actually drove the media that, in turn, created the ideals. The ideal, I argued, also served a political end.”

— Naomi Wolf

148. “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.”

— Naomi Wolf

149. “By simply dropping the official weight one stone below most women’s natural level, and redefining a woman’s womanly shape as by definition “too fat,” a wave of self-hatred swept over First World women, a reactionary psychology was perfected, and a major industry was born. It suavely countered the historical groundswell of female success with a mass conviction of female failure, a failure defined as implicit in womanhood itself.”

— Naomi Wolf

150. “If a woman’s sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer. It is hard, because of such conditioning, to envisage a female body free of pain and still desirable.”

— Naomi Wolf