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.
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
Britain is A world by itself, and we will nothing pay For wearing our own noses.
Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.
I wanted to explore the values that are at work, underpinning my life.
Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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