Naomi Wolf quotes - page 2

What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. (Naomi Wolf)
A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. [...] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Naomi Wolf
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
Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.
Naomi Wolf
Health makes good propaganda. "'Proof' that women's activities outside the home are detrimental to the health and welfare of themselves, their families and the country as a whole” lent impetus, writes Ann Oakley, to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. The ovaries were seen as collective property rather than the woman's own business, as the face and body outline are seen today. Who can argue with health?
Naomi Wolf
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
Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
Naomi Wolf
Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.
Naomi Wolf
Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.
Naomi Wolf
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
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)
To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
Naomi Wolf
It is important to distinguish between the power of the Internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers.
Naomi Wolf
Protesters should make their own media and not rely on mainstream media to cover them.
Naomi Wolf
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
Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries famously lasted 72 days, and was reported in the tabloids as being all about the big bucks paid by magazines for the bridal photos: it is a spectacle of a bride-to-be as entrepreneur, not as romantic heroine; the groom, in this scenario, is nothing but a prop.
Naomi Wolf
How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?
Naomi Wolf
It is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies.
Naomi Wolf
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
It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.
Naomi Wolf
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)
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
My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.
Naomi Wolf
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
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