A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

— Naomi Wolf

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

Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.

— Naomi Wolf

After we were hit on September 11, 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26, 2001, the U.S.A. Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it.

— Naomi Wolf

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

— Naomi Wolf

A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first.

— Naomi Wolf

An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith offers an economic explanation for “the persistence of the view of homemaking as a ‘higher calling’”: the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, “has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue.

— Naomi Wolf

Are women beautiful or aren't we?

— Naomi Wolf

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.

— Naomi Wolf

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

— Naomi Wolf