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 WolfRead
Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that societal perceptions of beauty can lead to harassment, which is influenced by subjective viewpoints.
Naomi Wolf's quote highlights the complex relationship between beauty and societal norms, asserting that while there are laws intended to protect individuals from harassment, the interpretation of what constitutes provocation often relies on a male perspective. This gendered lens can distort the understanding of beauty, leading to troubling behaviors that challenge the respect and dignity of individuals.
Themes
BeautyHarassmentPerceptionSocietyGender
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about gender equality during a women's rights seminar.
More from Naomi Wolf
All quotes →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 WolfRead
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.
Naomi WolfRead
The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to fit her vision.
Naomi WolfRead
The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
Naomi WolfRead
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 WolfRead
Similar quotes
Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.
Charles DarwinRead
A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.
Immanuel KantRead
Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!
Mark TwainRead
It is good to have an intellectual awareness of our dependence upon God - to understand how great He is and how very small we are in His sight.
Mother AngelicaRead
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.
Oscar WildeRead