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.
Interpretation
This quote critiques society's obsession with female thinness as a means of controlling women's behavior, rather than a genuine appreciation for beauty.
Naomi Wolf argues that the societal fixation on female thinness serves as a mechanism to enforce obedience among women, implying that dieting is a tool used to keep women subdued and compliant. This quote suggests that the pressure for women to conform to unrealistic beauty standards is not just about aesthetics but is deeply rooted in the politics of control and power dynamics, where a distracted and self-critical population is easier to manage.
In practice
In a discussion about body image during a women's rights seminar.
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.
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.
The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to fit her vision.
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.
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.
Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - IS innately disruptive of “business as usual.” That is WHY it is effective.
Fishing, Danny boy, is purely a state of mind. Some men, when they are fishing, are after fish. Me, I'm after things you could never set a barbed hook in.
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
The moment you venture out, something takes place in you and about you. Life comes to your aid in various ways. You may not like the form in which it comes to you - it may be misery, struggle, starvation - but when you invite life, things begin to happen.
What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?
And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.
The problem of the Middle East is poverty more than politics.
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