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
Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. - Naomi Wolf
To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality. - Naomi Wolf
Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints. - 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
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
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
Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight. - Naomi Wolf
If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. - Naomi Wolf
A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. - 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
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