Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf
Naomi R. Wolf is an American author, journalist and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 November 1962
CountryUnited States of America
pain real believe
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.
moving clothes numbers
Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.
self-esteem age gold
'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.
attitude choices body
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.
beautiful pain looks
Maybe the less pain we inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us
self justice feminist
Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.
country powerful men
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.
propaganda fashion-industry
Health makes good propaganda.
body-image sexuality relinquishing
To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
self-esteem names iron
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.
self-esteem mean sick
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.
country believe mean
When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.
self-esteem men thinking
What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?
self-esteem eye men
Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.