Quotes by Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well w...”

“You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.”

“The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, a...”

“The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty's sacram...”

“Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.”

“Economist Marvin Harris described women as a "literate and docile" labor pool, and "therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service indust...”

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.' Critic John Berger's well-known quote ha...”

“Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service indust...”

“What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”

“We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet...”

“Women are mere beauties in mens culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.”

“An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that justify the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the be...”

“By the 1980s beauty had come to play in womens status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value syst...”

“Health makes good propaganda.”

“Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the ...”

“[The ideology of beauty] has grown strong to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now t...”

“Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.”

“Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax ...”

“Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and ...”

“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 womens history; a quietly mad...”