110+ Naomi Wolf Quotes (Feminist, Activist And Writer)

Naomi Wolf is an American author, journalist, and political activist. She is best known for her books, such as The Beauty Myth, Promiscuities, and Give Me Liberty. Her work focuses on feminism, sexuality, and the politics of power and the media.

Top 10 Naomi Wolf Quotes

1. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
2. A Mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually VACCINATES her daughter against low self-esteem.
3. The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to fit her vision.
4. What editors are obliged to appear to say that
5. 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.
6. Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
7. 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.
8. To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
9. Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Become goddesses of disobedience.
• The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.
• The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
• Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.
• The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.
• Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.
• Health makes good propaganda.
• Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
• I don't want people to be suicidal. I want them to be energized and angry.
• Protesters should make their own media and not rely on mainstream media to cover them.

Naomi Wolf Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution. — 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

In the US, the 50s and 60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering televison 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

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

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

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 something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive. — Naomi Wolf

Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness. — Naomi Wolf

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

A culture fixation 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

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria. — Naomi Wolf

'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

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. — Naomi Wolf

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

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it. — Naomi Wolf

Democracy is disruptive... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. — Naomi Wolf

When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar—-who hands him the paper every morning. — Naomi Wolf

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

Democracy is disruptive. Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for this, but there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. Protesters ideally should read Gandhi and King and dedicate themselves to disciplined, long-term, non-violent disruption of business as usual - especially disruption of traffic. — 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. — Naomi Wolf

To me, my version of feminism, it's co-extensive with human rights and democracy. It's just part of the same fight for everyone being free, and having autonomy and dignity. It's not pitting one gender against another, it's not saying anything is better, it's just clearing away injustice. — Naomi Wolf

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement. — Naomi Wolf

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

If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen. — Naomi Wolf

The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition. — Naomi Wolf

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures - doctors, priests, psychiatrists - tell us that what we feel is not pain. — Naomi Wolf

...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship. — Naomi Wolf

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

Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - IS innately disruptive of “business as usual.” That is WHY it is effective. — Naomi Wolf

When women are subordinate by their culture, in being able to anticipate or think about pleasurable sex, it boosts dopamine, which is about confidence and assertiveness and motivation and drive and focus. So that to me, explained why for 5,000 years female sexuality has been targeted. — Naomi Wolf

“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

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

Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete. — Naomi Wolf

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

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

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

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 them. — 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

My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances. Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do. — Naomi Wolf

To find freedom and happiness in each others' arms, or you know, inside their own bodies and minds. That is a very empowering thing in a society that's trying to control us all the time. — 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

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 USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. — Naomi Wolf

In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment. — Naomi Wolf

I don't think we've got the concept in the West that male desire degrades men. Or that if men become sexually active, they become debased in some way, or slutty. Or lose status. — Naomi Wolf

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

The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right. — Naomi Wolf

When people like Glenn Beck throw around the word Nazi without taking that kind of care, they are engaging in demagoguery. I am doing it with a concrete footnoted historical context. — Naomi Wolf

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women. — Naomi Wolf

We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred. — Naomi Wolf

The '60s and '70s - I grew up in the Haight-Ashbury - people around me were going to school by day and all night long having these incredibly exciting meetings, mobilizing, marching, drafting statements. It was very intoxicating. It was very energizing. We've really forgotten a lot of those skills. Or they haven't been transmitted. It's useful to the people controlling us to have those skills not be available. — Naomi Wolf

I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically. — Naomi Wolf

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, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent. — Naomi Wolf

Evolutionary biology is crazy because sometimes it seems anybody can draw any conclusion they want. — 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

It has been said that each generation must win its own struggle to be free. -Robert F. Kennedy — Naomi Wolf

Why am I voting for Obama? Obama, of all the candidates, is the only one of the major candidates - even more than Hillary Clinton, when they were running against each other - to speak in favor of the defense of the Constitution and the separation of powers. — Naomi Wolf

Our culture is a capitalist society right? And so in order to always have the idea of the good life, means something you pay money for. Think of being outside of what you have and own, it always has to be receiving a difference. — Naomi Wolf

With the Internet there is even more fractioning since we are in echo chambers. With so much propaganda it is hard to calm down enough to listen. — Naomi Wolf

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

Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well. — Naomi Wolf

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

Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state. — Naomi Wolf

Obama has done things like Hitler did. Let me be very careful here. The National Socialists rounded people up and held them without trial, signed legislation that gave torture impunity, and spied on their citizens, just as Obama has. It isn't a question of what has been done that Hitler did. It's what does every dictator do, on the left or the right, that is being done here and now. — Naomi Wolf

What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men? — Naomi Wolf

I did not imagine that pregnant women were 'naturally' any more sensitive or exalted than people in any other condition; only it seemed as if - perhaps because we are in such a twilight state, a melting down and reconstituting of the self - there was more opportunity to hear strains from what must be the other side, the moral music of the sphere. — Naomi Wolf

The real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny. — Naomi Wolf

The media needs to tell a story. And whenever there's a new generation, you know, with a new conversation, it's handy to say well, these are the angry young men, these are the hippies, these are the boomers. — Naomi Wolf

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

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

I'll go anywhere to talk about the Constitution. I believe in trans-partisan organizing around these issues. — Naomi Wolf

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

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

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking. — Naomi Wolf

When people get this consciousness of the way things are supposed to be in America - that the locus of agency is in them, that they are supposed to be the ones setting the agenda - if people believe this, they get very energized. Yeah, it's annoying to have this extra burden of saving the country. — 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

Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed. — Naomi Wolf

If people are taking my book seriously and organizing, getting into office, caring about the constitution, and not waiting for someone else to lead them, I think, God bless them. All of us should be doing that. The left should be doing that. — Naomi Wolf

Maybe the less pain we inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us — Naomi Wolf

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda. — Naomi Wolf

I'm a big believer in debate and difference of opinion. — Naomi Wolf

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

I don't want to overstate tantra because I'm sure there are scumbags everywhere, but it seems like it's an ideology that actually respects female desire. — Naomi Wolf

We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women — Naomi Wolf

From 1970 onwards, our culture told both sexes that individual expression was paramount. And for women, that was defined as the right to choose an interesting a career, a high-status mate, the desirable handbag or vacation, the perfect family size, and a definitionally fruitless quest for 'perfection.' — Naomi Wolf

Women are mere "beauties" in men's 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. — 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

The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they're not gone. — Naomi Wolf

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

When a leader has deployed a private army, that is one definition of a police state. Another is when the president, or a leader, has his own treasury. — Naomi Wolf

People of all kinds are waking up. Even people passionate for Obama realize even that knight on a white horse isn't enough to roll back the oligarchy. I'm seeing a lot of action on the left as well that is never reported. But the Tea Party response is the most visible and the initiative they show is the most recognizable. — Naomi Wolf

Life Lessons by Naomi Wolf

1. Naomi Wolf encourages us to take risks and to challenge the status quo in order to create a better world. She teaches us to be courageous and to speak up for what we believe in, no matter the obstacles.
2. Naomi Wolf also emphasizes the importance of self-care and self-love. She encourages us to be kind to ourselves and to take the time to nurture our own individual needs and desires.
3. Finally, Naomi Wolf emphasizes the power of words and the importance of using them to create meaningful connections with others. She teaches us to use our words to build bridges, not walls.