Naomi Wolf quotes
Naomi Wolf is an American author, journalist, and feminist known for her influential works on women’s rights and culture. Her debut book "The Beauty Myth" sparked widespread discussion on beauty standards and their effects on women. She continues to impact contemporary feminist debates and social commentary. Here are 60 of her quotes:
The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
Naomi Wolf
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.
Naomi Wolf
Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. [...] You are not taught-and it is a disgrace that you aren't-that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
Naomi Wolf
What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
Naomi Wolf
For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. [...] Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.
Naomi Wolf
Just as 'beauty' is not related to sex, neither is it related to love. Even having it does not bestow love on a woman, though the beauty myth claims that it must. It is because 'beauty' is so hostile to love that many beautiful women are so cynical about men. [...] The beautiful woman is excluded forever from the rewards and responsibilities of particular human love, for she cannot trust that any man will love her 'for herself alone.' A hellish doubt inheres in the myth that makes impersonal 'beauty' a prerequisite for love: Where does love go when beauty vanishes? And, if a woman cannot be loved 'for herself alone,' for whom is she being loved?
Naomi Wolf