Naomi Wolf Quotes About Myth
-
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden 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.
→ -
As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.
→ -
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.
→ -
Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.
→ -
Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.
→ -
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.
→ -
As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.
→ -
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
→
Related Authors
-
Emily Ratajkowski Model -
Andrea Dworkin Writer -
Germaine Greer Journalist -
Susan Faludi Journalist -
Harold Bloom Literary critic -
Jessica Valenti Writer -
Abbie Hoffman Social activist -
Rand Paul United States Senator -
Ron Paul Former U.S. Representative -
Camille Paglia Teacher -
Phyllis Chesler Writer -
Gloria Steinem Journalist -
Edward Snowden System Administrator -
Rebecca Walker Writer -
Bell Hooks Author -
Betty Friedan Writer -
Katie Roiphe Author -
Christina Hoff Sommers Author -
Peter Schiff Author -
Naomi Klein Author