Top 100 Naomi Wolf Quotes
#1. It seemed to me, watching, that if you were dextrous enough to gift-wrap an independent-minded amphibian, you could just about manage a condom.
Naomi Wolf
#2. something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.
Naomi Wolf
#3. Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
Naomi Wolf
#5. It is human nature to abuse power, no matter who you are.
Naomi Wolf
#6. When women breached the power structure in the 1980s?two economies finally merged. Beauty was no longer just a symbolic form of currency: it literally became money.
Naomi Wolf
#7. Camille Paglia is: 'the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.
Naomi Wolf
#8. What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?
Naomi Wolf
#9. French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.
Naomi Wolf
#10. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.
Naomi Wolf
#11. 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
#12. We are all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss classified information every day - go to any Washington or New York dinner party where real journalists are present, and you will hear discussion of leaked or classified information. That is journalists' job in a free society.
Naomi Wolf
#13. It is standard practice for corrupt leaders who are seeking a certain political outcome to hype or manipulate a terror threat or a threat of violent domestic subversion. While sometimes the threat is manufactured, frequently the hyped threat is based on a real danger.
Naomi Wolf
#14. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.
Naomi Wolf
#15. Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration.
Naomi Wolf
#16. Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out ... are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.
Naomi Wolf
#17. The First Amendment applies to rogues and scoundrels. You don't lose your First Amendment rights because of a sleazy personality, or even for having committed a crime. Felons in jail are protected by the First Amendment.
Naomi Wolf
#18. The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don't, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.
Naomi Wolf
#19. It has been said that each generation must win its own struggle to be free. -Robert F. Kennedy
Naomi Wolf
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
Naomi Wolf
#23. We often feel a twinge of guilt over our own fascination with presidential candidates' wives - as if we are secretly reading the 'Star' for our campaign information instead of the policy journals.
Naomi Wolf
#24. When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what they feared most from men, they said: 'We're afraid they'll kill us.' When men were asked the same question about women, they said: 'we're afraid they'll laugh at us.
Naomi Wolf
#25. Poststructuralism ... is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.
Naomi Wolf
#26. Let's dare to release our immature fantasies of a magically faultless U.S. system and a magically protected election process. We have been lucky as a nation, but sometimes continued luck depends on action.
Naomi Wolf
#27. For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen. I am just much more likely to try to link essays to webcasts or videos. The best way for these two media to move forward, to inform and make change, is in tandem; together they are more than the sum of their parts.
Naomi Wolf
#28. A Mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually VACCINATES her daughter against low self-esteem.
Naomi Wolf
#29. The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.
Naomi Wolf
#30. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
Naomi Wolf
#31. 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
#32. There is this giant void in the culture about women in that age group as heroines, as romantic beings, as sexual beings and as creative beings, and there's not that void for men. Women don't stop being all those things as their lives continue into those decades.
Naomi Wolf
#33. Maybe the less pain we inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us
Naomi Wolf
#34. 'The End of America' details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one.
Naomi Wolf
#36. 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
#37. If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.
Naomi Wolf
#38. What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.
Naomi Wolf
#39. Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.
Naomi Wolf
#40. Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.
Naomi Wolf
#41. Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we're the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.
Naomi Wolf
#42. 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
#43. The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.
Naomi Wolf
#44. Democracy is disruptive ... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.
Naomi Wolf
#45. Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and "beautiful") stone women.
Naomi Wolf
#46. 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
#47. Victorian feminists made the mistake of making membership of the sisterhood conditional on signing up to a particular policy agenda. Marxist feminists made a similar mistake of saying, 'You can't be a real feminist unless you join with miners, the unions, the vegans.'
Naomi Wolf
#48. 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.
Naomi Wolf
#49. Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
Naomi Wolf
#50. Of course a woman who decides to work full time as a mother in the home can be happy and deserves full respect from us. Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do. The goal is to remake the world so that our choices are not so stark.
Naomi Wolf
#51. A white person who claims to have no impediment of vision in this country is not, I think, telling the whole truth. And when it comes to race relations, not telling the whole truth about the fog one inhabits slows down the work of groping forward.
Naomi Wolf
#52. Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.
Naomi Wolf
#53. The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her beauty.
Naomi Wolf
#54. 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
#55. Porn puts people to sleep, conceptually and politically as well as erotically.
Naomi Wolf
#56. As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.
Naomi Wolf
#57. Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.
Naomi Wolf
#58. What we should notice is that studies show that fathers' presence in their children's lives has a marked effect on how well their kids do later in life, so why aren't we asking how we can better liberate men from the workplace to be home with their kids more often?
Naomi Wolf
#59. For Gore 2000, I was a formal campaign adviser: contrary to RNC mythology, my brief was not 'wardrobe,' but rather policy on women's issues, and messaging. I was also married to a Clinton speechwriter, and observed the message decision-making process from the perspective of a spouse.
Naomi Wolf
#60. A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Naomi Wolf
#61. 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
#62. Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.
Naomi Wolf
#63. the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.
Naomi Wolf
#64. Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.
Naomi Wolf
#65. The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone.
Naomi Wolf
#66. 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.
Naomi Wolf
#67. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
Naomi Wolf
#68. What, after all, is the narrative of 'the American Dream?' It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.
Naomi Wolf
#69. Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.
Naomi Wolf
#70. Every Yom Kippur, Jewish tradition requires a strict spiritual inventory. You aren't supposed to just sit around feeling guilty, but to take action in the real world to set things right.
Naomi Wolf
#71. When some of the neural "lights" in question have been switched off by injury, the outcome can be connected to a form of generalized depression, or what Dr. Jim Pfaus of Concordia University calls "anhedonia" - a state of pleasurelessness, bleakness, or grayness, in perceptions of the world.
Naomi Wolf
#72. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
Naomi Wolf
#73. 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.
Naomi Wolf
#74. 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
#75. She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.
Naomi Wolf
#76. The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power.
Naomi Wolf
#77. Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness.
Naomi Wolf
#78. Every woman is wired differently. Some women's nerves branch more in the vagina; other women's nerves branch more in the clitoris. Some branch a great deal in the perineum, or at the mouth of the cervix. That accounts for some of the differences in female sexual response.
Naomi Wolf
#79. 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.
Naomi Wolf
#80. Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies.
Naomi Wolf
#81. When I was a baby feminist, leading feminist thinkers were insisting that if women ran the world, there would be no sadism or war.
Naomi Wolf
#82. 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
#83. Women's flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.
Naomi Wolf
#84. To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
Naomi Wolf
#85. Porn, it turns out, eventually takes the sexiness - that is, the wildness - out of sex.
Naomi Wolf
#86. Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain's question: Is it safe here?
Naomi Wolf
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Only God, my dear," wrote Yeats blithely, "Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair." This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines.
Naomi Wolf
#90. My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.
Naomi Wolf
#91. The vulva, clitoris, and vagina are actually best understood as the surface of an ocean that is shot through with vibrant networks of underwater lightning - intricate and fragile, individually varied neural pathways.
Naomi Wolf
#92. How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?
Naomi Wolf
#93. In the U.S., the '50s and '60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme 'Hunger in America.'
Naomi Wolf
#94. A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom.
Naomi Wolf
#95. The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.
Naomi Wolf
#96. I don't think most men do hate women at all - I think most men are trying their best and facing a culturation into masculine behaviour that forces them to deny their own humanity and to exaggerate distance from the world of women.
Naomi Wolf
#97. I'm a big believer in debate and difference of opinion.
Naomi Wolf
#98. 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
#99. I am delighted to be joining 'Guardian U.S.'s team as a weekly columnist, and to have the chance to address American and global current events on its distinguished platform. 'Guardian U.S.' brings the 'Guardian's hard-hitting investigative brand to a new focus on American news and opinion.
Naomi Wolf
#100. Madonna is that forbidden thing, the Nietzschean creative woman. Her preoccupation with a high level of work doesn't allow her to follow the usual script that powerful women are expected to follow - 'don't hate me for my success, don't hate me for my power.'
Naomi Wolf
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