223 Quotes by Naomi Wolf

We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution. As women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it waned to carry on its work of social control.

The beauty myth generates low self-esteem for women and high profits for corporations as a result.

The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today’s woman has become her “beauty.

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 it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.

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

The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.

Women will be free of the beauty myth when we can choose to use our faces and clothes and bodies as simply one form of self-expression out of a full range of others. We can dress up for our pleasure, but we must speak up for our rights.

Aging in women is ‘unbeautiful’ since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.

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.