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"Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is 'done up' she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by 'beauty'--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him."
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"[B]eauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor."

"The more you appreciate the things of beauty all around you, the more beautiful things will fill your life."
Explore more quotes by Naomi Wolf

"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."

"For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution."

"Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken."

"Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history, a quietly mad population is a tractable one."

"The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking 'beautiful.' If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill."

"When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar--who hands him the paper every morning."

"'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 is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact."

"Only God, my dear, wrote Yeats blithely, 'Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair. This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines."

"Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - is innately disruptive of 'business as usual.' That is why it is effective."
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