Famous Quotes by Naomi Wolf

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

Feminism is not about being a victim. It's about fighting back, and it's about standing up and taking our power back.

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.

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

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

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

Until women themselves reject stigma and shame, safe healthcare will not be a reality.

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

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty.

The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free.

Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke.

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

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

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.

There really is an ‘in’ group, a ‘power’ group that invites a certain kind of reading of events.

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, but from media.

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly.

What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.

To maximize the value of feminism for women, it needs to be reclaimed—and often from those who have been its most prominent spokespeople.