I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Naomi Wolf

"Beauty" is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy acording to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.
Naomi Wolf:

A man's right to confer judgment on any woman's beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given....As such, it is daily exercised more harshly in compensation for the other rights over women, and the other ways to control them, now lost forever.
Naomi Wolf:

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:

No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize--as her personal problem--observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.
Naomi Wolf:

Society really doesn't care about women's appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have.
Naomi Wolf:

Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An ideology that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy, merely an atmosphere.
Naomi Wolf:

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 Wolf:

"There is a terrible spiritual and emotional hunger among many women, including myself, for social behavior and ritual that respect and even worship female sexuality and reproductive power. We are no longer - if we ever really were - goddesses, priestesses, or queens of our own sexuality. But we want to be."
Naomi Wolf:

Ask for money in your lives. Expect it. Own it. Learn to use it. Little girls learn a debilitating fear of money--that it's not feminine to insure we are fairly paid for honest work . ... The only language the status quo understands is money, votes, and public embarrassment."
Naomi Wolf:

"Feminism is a logical extension of democracy"
Naomi Wolf:

Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well. The piled plate, the choicest cut, say: We think you're worth this much of the tribe's resources."
Naomi Wolf:

Clinging to rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs, and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish, and casually destructive men and women.
Naomi Wolf:

We need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.
Naomi Wolf:

Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus in its full humanity must die. But it is never right or necessary to minimize the value of lives involved or the sacrifice incurred in letting them go. Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement, and responsibility can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position - and consolidate the support of the center.
Naomi Wolf:

Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your
truth and that is not speaking.
Naomi Wolf:

"And in the wake of the sexual revolution, with the line between 'good' and 'bad' girls always shifting, keeping us unsteady, as it is meant to do, it will not be safe for us to live comfortably in our skins until we say: You can no longer separate us out one from another. We are all bad girls."
Naomi Wolf:

"Sure, dead white men formulated the principles of representative democracy and the free press. But the flaws lie not in the ideals themselves, but in the fact that the founders' blindness, in structuring citizenship as white, male and propertied, and the self-interest of those who hold power now, prevents the ideals from unfolding according to their own logic."
Naomi Wolf:

To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
Naomi Wolf:

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.
Naomi Wolf:

"Let's be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women's choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing it and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: in a sensual politics, female is beautiful." - Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf:

To live in a culture [TV, adverts] in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long.
Naomi Wolf:

"In our culture, a girl's passage through tests and rigors into womanhood is marked in the realm of body control such as dieting, but also in the realm of sex acts and the accumulation of material possessions. Our girls move toward womanhood through the demarcations of what they can buy and own or of who wants to sleep with them. The danger to girls is that the culture often makes girls turn into women in ways they do not choose before they are psychologically ready, and it defines their readiness as a passive biological development. It gives them little opportunity to turn themselves into women as an active, healthy goal toward which to struggle and to claim at last with pride. 'Be a man,' the culture says to boys in many ways, both harmful and beneficial .... In our world, 'Demonstrate that you are a woman' means simply 'Take off your clothes.'
Naomi Wolf:

The American mind-set celebrates winning and avoids noticing the corollary, that winners win only what losers lose
Naomi Wolf:

We are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution
Naomi Wolf:

Perhaps we are entering a new phase,in which the old American goal of eradicating communism by a new American goal of eradicating the worldwide oppression of women.
Naomi Wolf:

"The other extreme of the female public voice is perhaps represented by Jeane Kirkpatrick: a voice so Olympian, so neck-up and uninflected by the experiences of the female body, that the subtle message received by young female writers is: to enter public voice, one must abide by the no-uterus rule."
Naomi Wolf:

"Vibrant, combative and broad-ranging, the new voices in Listen Up are the best proof yet that the next wave of rising feminists is magnificently equal to its task of creating a movement that should be, in terms of its ideas, always renewed."
Naomi Wolf:

But really, the problem is that a lot of feminist ideology simply doesn't translate well into real life. It doesn't empower young women on a practical level.
Naomi Wolf:

"Our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it,"
Naomi Wolf:


"Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete,"
Naomi Wolf:

"AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires,"