Naomi Wolf Quotes About Beauty Myth
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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.
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Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.
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To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.
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A culture fixation 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.
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Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
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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.
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Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
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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.
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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.
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A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
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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.
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Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.
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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.
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'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 is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.
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As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.
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The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.
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The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to fit her vision.
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The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
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