Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they take their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

— Naomi Wolf

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.

— Naomi Wolf

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.

— Naomi Wolf

Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness.

— Naomi Wolf

Of course a woman who decides to work full time as a mother in the home can be happy and deserves full respect from us. Motherhood is one of the most challenging and creative jobs anyone can do. The goal is to remake the world so that our choices are not so stark.

— Naomi Wolf

Only God, my dear,” wrote Yeats blithely, “Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.” This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines.

— Naomi Wolf

Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - is innately disruptive of 'business as usual.' That is why it is effective.

— Naomi Wolf

Possibilities for women have become so open-ended that they threaten to destabilize the institutions on which a male-dominated culture has depended, and a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes has forced a demand for counter images. The Beauty Myth

— Naomi Wolf

Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration.

— Naomi Wolf

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him.

— Naomi Wolf