223 Quotes by 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.

From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and “communist” academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation’s premier artists and writers had fled as well.11 The Nazi periodical The Nettle depicted this emigration as “a triumph for the German nation.”12.

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.

Female thinness and youth are not in themselves next to godliness in this culture. Society really doesn’t care about women’s appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will “be good,” but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.

The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty’s sacraments glow brighter than ever. As women are inundated with claims on their time, ritual products give them an alibi to take some private time for themselves. At their best they give women back a taste of mystery and sensuality to compensate them for their days spent in the harsh light of the workplace.

Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well. The piled plate, the choicest cut, say: We think you’re worth this much of the tribe’s resources.

Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance.

The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don’t, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.

The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.