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

More quotes by 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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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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The idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
Naomi Wolf
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Become goddesses of disobedience.
Naomi Wolf
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When women are pessimistic about their political strength and feel hopeless about changing the conditions of their lives, it is almost as if they do not believe that democracy means the country belongs to them. But it's true.
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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I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.
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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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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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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In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of overpermiticisation - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.
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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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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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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Protesters should make their own media and not rely on mainstream media to cover them.
Naomi Wolf
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I'm not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your Greenwich Village apartment. I'm worried about things like the McCain Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.
Naomi Wolf
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The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
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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Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism.
Naomi Wolf