Quotessence
Home / Authors / Naomi Wolf Books
Naomi Wolf

Naomi Wolf Books

Author

Misconceptions

A source page for quotes linked to Naomi Wolf.

0 quotes

Related Quotes

“What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?”

Girls
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped. In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.”

FearFreedomAttitudeLiberty
Book:Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries
Create image

“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 to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“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 more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemSelf LoveAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. 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.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet IndustryConsumer
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence "You're beautiful," which is next to "I love you" in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is destined to be unhappy. And the "luckiest" woman of all, told she is loved because she's "beautiful," is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“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. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]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.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women. According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsDietingPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll's house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.”

BeautySocietySelf EsteemMarketingAdvertisingMagazinesEating DisordersImages
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not show on her body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“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. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence--but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson--that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them.”

BeautySelf EsteemAdvertisingImages
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.”

BeautySocietyFeministBody Image
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“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.”

BeautySocietySelf EsteemEating DisordersImages
Author:Naomi Wolf
Create image

“Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Never," enjoins a women's magazine, "mention the size of his [penis] in public...and never, ever let him know that anyone else knows or you may find it shrivels up and disappears, serving you right." That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or we understand on some level that right now that effect is desirable and appropriate. A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.”

LibertyDemocracyIndependenceEqualityUsaDeclarationSubversive
Book:The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Create image

“For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if "beautiful," her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful.”

CultureBeautySocietyFeminismSelf EsteemAgingMarketingEqualitySexualityAdvertisingMagazinesPornographyBody ImageEating DisordersCosmeticsPlastic SurgeryFashion IndustryDouble StandardsObjectificationSexual ViolenceImagesMass CultureCosmetic SurgeryDiet Industry
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“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 market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women's dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time. Emotionally unstable relationships, high divorce rates, and a large population cast out into the sexual marketplace are good for business in a consumer economy. Beauty pornography is intent on making modern sex brutal and boring and only as deep as a mirror's mercury, anti-erotic for both men and women.”

SocietySelf EsteemAdvertisinng
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“At the same time, I heard from a cousin that my elderly relative was in a nursing home, but, 'because of COVID,' her family was not allowed to see her ... A sociable woman with many grandchildren who loved her, this isolation seemed like it would be a form of torture for her.”

WarHumanityEducationEconomyDemocracySocietyCommunismWarfare
Book:The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human
Create image

“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 where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.”

SexFantasyFeminismSexualityAdolescence
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“This is not a conspiracy theory; it doesn’t have to be. Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital lies,” and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are destructive communal illusions. Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for counterimages.”

IbsenHenrik IbsenVital Lies
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“Come incominciare? Dobbiamo essere sfrontate e avide. Inseguire il piacere. Evitare il dolore. Indossare, toccare, mangiare e bere quello che ci fa piacere. Tollerare le scelte delle altre donne. Ricercare il sesso che vogliamo e combattere furiosamente contro quello che non vogliamo. Scegliere le nostre cause. E quando avremo infranto e cambiato le regole in modo che non venga scosso il nostro senso della nostra bellezza, canteremo questa bellezza, la sventoleremo e ci crogioleremo in essa: secondo una politica sensuale, donna é bello. [...] La prossima fase del nostro movimento in avanti come donne singole, come donne unite e come abitanti del nostro corpo e di questo pianeta, dipende da quello che decideremo di vedere quando ci guarderemo allo specchio.”

Femminismo
Book:The Beauty Myth
Create image

“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.”

IfsAttentionLeaderIssuesRiskEffectsSeriousThreatOneselfUglyDrawingCharacteristicsAgendasBrushesRivalsIdentificationIdentifyingWoman LeaderDrawing Attention
Author:Naomi Wolf
Create image