{"author":"Naomi Wolf","author_id":"Naomi+Wolf","total_quotes":62,"quotes":[{"text":"After we were hit on September 11, 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the U.S.A. Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["october","chance","patriot "],"id":6293,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"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.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["appearance","beauty","body-image","eating-disorders","self-esteem","society"],"id":9685,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"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.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["beauty","control","diet","fad","feminism","feminist","food","myth","obedience"],"id":9825,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"The mass depiction of the modern woman as a 'beauty' is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, 'beauty' is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way 'beauty' so directly contradicts women's real situation.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["beauty","media","society"],"id":16881,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"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.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["advertising","beauty","eating-disorders","feminism","self-esteem","society"],"id":30507,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s 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 systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["feminism"],"id":37154,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and then there is the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. Even Gertrude Stein said of Picasso, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight…but his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism I was unable to resist.” By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot.What becomes of the 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.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["beauty","feminism","love","our-shared-shelf"],"id":41798,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...Pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["beauty","eating-disorders","images","self-esteem","society"],"id":46734,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["attitude","critical-thinking","defiance","dissent","empowerment","freedom","social-order"],"id":47636,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"},{"text":"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.","author":"Naomi Wolf","tags":["appearance","beauty","body-image","eating-disorders","society","weight"],"id":54704,"author_id":"Naomi+Wolf"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":62,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}