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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.

Naomi Wolf

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Naomi Wolf
Age: 61
Born: 1962
Born: November 12
Activist
Author
Conspiracy Theorist
Feminist
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Political Adviser
Political Writer
San Francisco County
California
Naomi R. Wolf
Naomi Rebekah Wolf
Women
Obedience
Thinness
Mad
Fixation
Population
Dieting
Female
Potent
Beauty
Quietly
History
Diets
Culture
Obsession
Tractable
Political
Feminism
Sedative

More quotes by Naomi Wolf

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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.
Naomi Wolf
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It is important to distinguish between the power of the internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers.
Naomi Wolf
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Excellence, to me, is the state of grace that can descend only when one tunes out all the world's clamor, listens to an inward voice one recognizes as wiser than one's own, and transcribes without fear.
Naomi Wolf
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To me, my version of feminism, it's co-extensive with human rights and democracy. It's just part of the same fight for everyone being free, and having autonomy and dignity. It's not pitting one gender against another, it's not saying anything is better, it's just clearing away injustice.
Naomi Wolf
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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. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual - and hence social - confidence while undermining that of women.
Naomi Wolf
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Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.
Naomi Wolf
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What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?
Naomi Wolf
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Women's orgasms will quadruple in intensity if she's in a beautiful, dimly lit room versus a brightly lit, uncomfortable room.
Naomi Wolf
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I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.
Naomi Wolf
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From 1970 onwards, our culture told both sexes that individual expression was paramount. And for women, that was defined as the right to choose an interesting a career, a high-status mate, the desirable handbag or vacation, the perfect family size, and a definitionally fruitless quest for 'perfection.'
Naomi Wolf
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When people like Glenn Beck throw around the word Nazi without taking that kind of care, they are engaging in demagoguery. I am doing it with a concrete footnoted historical context.
Naomi Wolf
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There was a bad patch in the '80s and early '90s when feminist thinking had become sort of a monopoly and had developed a series of litmus tests.
Naomi Wolf
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'The End of America' details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one.
Naomi Wolf
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Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.
Naomi Wolf
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Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.
Naomi Wolf
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I am delighted to be joining 'Guardian U.S.''s team as a weekly columnist, and to have the chance to address American and global current events on its distinguished platform. 'Guardian U.S.' brings the 'Guardian''s hard-hitting investigative brand to a new focus on American news and opinion.
Naomi Wolf
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Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.
Naomi Wolf
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Historically, when a leader has deployed his own military against civilians, it's never been good. There's never been a time where it's ended well.
Naomi Wolf
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The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.
Naomi Wolf
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It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.
Naomi Wolf