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Naomi Wolf Quotes

Total quotes: 31
“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Tagged: The Beauty Myth, Social Construct of Beauty, Political Sedatives, Female Obedience, Obsession and Agenda, Beauty Standards, Beauty Standards As Sedatives, Quote of the Moment
“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.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Tagged: The Male Gaze, Bodies In The Male Gaze, The Desire To Be Desired, Estranged From The Body, Estranged From Your Own 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?”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Tagged: Male Gaze, The Male Gaze, Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Female Sexuality In The Male Gaze, Catering To Male Desire, Objectification of Women, Men As Subjects, Women As Objects, Pleasure, Inequity In Pleasure, Cultural Negation, What Gets Excluded From The Narrative
“Female sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is not just about sexuality, or just about pleasure. It serves, also, as a medium of female self-knowledge and hopefulness; female creativity and courage; female focus and initiative; female bliss and transcendence; and as medium of a sensibility that feels very much like freedom.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Pleasure, Self-knowledge, Creativity, Prioritizing Female Pleasure, Female Desire, Liberation, Female Sexuality
“So it was not just that orgasm might heighten creativity in women; maybe creativity also heightened orgasm.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Orgasm, Female Pleasure, Creativity, Sex, Muse
“She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Tagged: The Male Gaze, Bodies In The Male Gaze, The Desire To Be Desired, Self-Validation, Female Beauty
“What it needed was a replacement shackle, a new material burden that would drain surplus energy and lower confidence, an ideology that would produce the women workers it needs, but only in the mold in which it wants them.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, Labor, Work, Career, beauty, skincare, the third shift
“Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, beauty, the third shift, The Beauty Myth, Liberation, Money
“Just as being valued and relaxed can heighten female sexual response, “bad stress” can dramatically interfere with all of women’s sexual processes.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Pleasure, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Biochemical High, Trance State, Sexual/Love Transcendence, Emotional Safety, Toxic Stress, Sex
“That’s what explained vaginal versus clitoral orgasms? Neural wiring? Not culture, not upbringing, not patriarchy, not feminism, not Freud?”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Female Sexuality In The Male Gaze, Pleasure, What Gets Excluded From The Narrative, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, humor, Freud, Patriarchy, Culture and Society, feminism
“Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain’s question: Is it safe for her?”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Pleasure, Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Female Arousal, Emotional Safety, Toxic Stress
“To be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, beauty, the third shift, The Beauty Myth, Liberation, Harassment, Sexual Assault
“Why do women care so much what the magazines say and show? They care because, though magazines are trivialized, they represent something very important: women's mass culture”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, beauty, the third shift, The Beauty Myth, Liberation, Money, magazines, Media, Culture
“What is beautiful about her body does not belong to her, but to god. But what is ugly is hers alone, proof of her sin, worthy of any abuse.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, beauty, the third shift, The Beauty Myth, Liberation, Money, magazines, Media, Culture
“This biological, evolutionary connection for women of possible ecstasy to emotional security has implications that cannot be overstressed. Relaxing allows for female arousal.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Pleasure, Self-knowledge, Creativity, Prioritizing Female Pleasure, Female Desire, Liberation, Female Sexuality, Female Arousal, Emotional Safety
“Many people don’t like being touched if they are angry, but women seem to have more trouble than men with arousal if they are upset.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Pleasure, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Sexual/Love Transcendence, Emotional Safety, Toxic Stress, Sex, Gender Differences, arousal, Female Pleasure, Male Pleasure
“A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Tagged: beauty, thin, Weight, obedience
“We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women.”
— Naomi Wolf, A Woman's Worth
Tagged: Fashion, Photography, Misogyny, feminism, beauty
“The woman literally often can’t take an intimate touch if her lover has recently been verbally disrespectful, or has failed verbally to soothe 'the Goddess in her' at some point beforehand, priming the release of oxytocin and vasopressin in her body and preparing the parasympathetic nervous system to do its magical work.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Pleasure, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Sexual/Love Transcendence, Emotional Safety, Toxic Stress, Sex, Gender Differences, arousal, Female Pleasure, Male Pleasure, Biochemical High, Biochemistry of Sex, Intimacy
“The autonomic nervous system also responds to a woman’s sense of safety or danger. It sends the signals to the brain and then to the body that one is safe, so one can relax, eat, and digest; or relax and sleep; or relax and make love.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Female Sexuality In The Male Gaze, Pleasure, What Gets Excluded From The Narrative, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Culture and Society, feminism, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Biochemical High
“The female body reacts in the same way to “bad stress” whether the context is the birthing room or the university or the workplace. If the female brain senses that an environment is not safe, its stress response inhibits all the same organs and systems, regardless of setting.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Pleasure, Self-knowledge, Creativity, Prioritizing Female Pleasure, Female Desire, Liberation, Female Sexuality, Female Arousal, Emotional Safety, Toxic Stress
“Aging in women is "unbeautiful" since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span. ”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Aging, beauty, Women, feminism
“In the West, where paid labor centers on a forty-hour week, the unavoidable fact to confront the power structure is that women newcomers came from a group used to working more than twice as hard and long as men. And not only for less pay; for none.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, Labor, Work, Career
“The woman who dies thinnest, with the fewest wrinkles, wins.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, beauty, the third shift, The Beauty Myth, Liberation, Money, magazines, Media, Culture, fat, Weight, Diets, Aging, Wrinkles
“Gradually, I reexperienced the sense of deep emotional union, of postcoital creative euphoria, of joy with one’s self and with one’s lover, of confidence and volubility and the sense that all was well in some existential way, that I thought I had lost forever.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Female Sexuality In The Male Gaze, Pleasure, What Gets Excluded From The Narrative, Female Orgasm, Female Pleasure, Sex, Lovemaking
“To enter the transcendental state that takes the female brain into “high” orgasm, you absolutely need to feel safe; safe from “bad stress,” in the sense of knowing you are entering a trance state in the presence of someone who will protect you if necessary at the very least, and not endanger you or put you in circumstances out of your control.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Pleasure, What Gets Excluded From The Narrative, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Culture and Society, feminism, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Biochemical High, Trance State, Sexual/Love Transcendence, Emotional Safety, Toxic Stress, Consent, Consent Not Coercion
“The working woman was told she had to think about 'beauty' in a way that undermined, step for step, the way she had begun to think as a result of the successes of the women's movement. This last vital lie applied to individual women's lives the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
Tagged: Women, feminism, Career, beauty, skincare, the third shift, The Beauty Myth, Liberation
“The difference in our bodies’ responses may make male-female connection especially tricky in such moments: this one simple difference in female reaction to different ways of being spoken to is one enormously significant reason that so many sexual approaches from men to women in long-term relationships become derailed, to the great sorrow and frustration of both men and women.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Pleasure, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Biochemical High, Trance State, Sexual/Love Transcendence, Emotional Safety, Toxic Stress, Sex, Gender Differences
“The full melting response or “high orgasm” in women—which I would define (though our language around female sexual response is so inadequate) as that kind of orgasm that most intensely induces the most complete possible trance state and that most involves all the body systems, so that afterward the woman feels the most replete and also experiences the highest level possible for her of the positive brain chemicals’ activities.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Female Sexuality In The Male Gaze, Pleasure, What Gets Excluded From The Narrative, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Culture and Society, feminism, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Biochemical High, Female Pleasure
“One could say that she actually becomes, biochemically, a wild woman or a maenad. She becomes so disinhibited and impervious to pain that it is as if she is in a state of altered consciousness. Women in “high” orgasm go more deeply into this trance state than at any other time. Judgment is suspended in this state, and women do not even feel pain in the same ways as in normal consciousness.”
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: Revised and Updated
Tagged: Female Desire, Female Sexuality, Pleasure, What Gets Excluded From The Narrative, Female Orgasm, Neuroscience, Culture and Society, feminism, Pleasure and the Brain, Your Brain On Orgasm, Biochemical High, Trance State, Sexual/Love Transcendence, Wild Woman
“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.”
— Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Tagged: shallow, Attraction, inner beauty, looks, gender
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