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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
Population
Dieting
Female
Potent
Beauty
Quietly
History
Diets
Culture
Obsession
Tractable
Political
Feminism
Sedative
Women
Obedience
Thinness
Mad
Fixation

More quotes by Naomi Wolf

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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.
Naomi Wolf
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I'm a big believer in debate and difference of opinion.
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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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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Democracy is disruptive. Around the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for this, but there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption. Protesters ideally should read Gandhi and King and dedicate themselves to disciplined, long-term, non-violent disruption of business as usual - especially disruption of traffic.
Naomi Wolf
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If people are taking my book seriously and organizing, getting into office, caring about the constitution, and not waiting for someone else to lead them, I think, God bless them. All of us should be doing that. The left should be doing that.
Naomi Wolf
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I don't want to overstate tantra because I'm sure there are scumbags everywhere, but it seems like it's an ideology that actually respects female desire.
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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Why am I voting for Obama? Obama, of all the candidates, is the only one of the major candidates - even more than Hillary Clinton, when they were running against each other - to speak in favor of the defense of the Constitution and the separation of powers.
Naomi Wolf
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How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America, that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?
Naomi Wolf
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What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
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 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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Millions of people have to restore liberty and have to understand the danger and personal risk they face in a police state.
Naomi Wolf
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As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.
Naomi Wolf
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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.
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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When people get this consciousness of the way things are supposed to be in America - that the locus of agency is in them, that they are supposed to be the ones setting the agenda - if people believe this, they get very energized. Yeah, it's annoying to have this extra burden of saving the country.
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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If the whole world is a battlefield, then the United States is also a battlefield.
Naomi Wolf