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"Are women beautiful or aren't we?"
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"She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body!"

"Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night..."

"She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences."

"Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman's breasts, it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy."

"I'm not afraid of my femininity and I'm not afraid of my sexuality."

"It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest."

"Virtue in a woman is like pepper in the soup. A little makes for a nice seasoning. Butoverdo it, and no one wants very much of you."

"A women can run, hide, play and have fun but she will shine far better when she just smiles without none."

"Femininity appears to be one of those pivotal qualities that is so important no one can define it."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"'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."

"Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints."

"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."

"After we were hit on September 11, 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the U.S.A. Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it."

"The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty's sacraments glow brighter than ever. As women are inundated with claims on their time, ritual products give them an alibi to take some private time for themselves. At their best they give women back a taste of mystery and sensuality to compensate them for their days spent in the harsh light of the workplace."

"A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male 'ideal' from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first."

"Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good."

"The ideology of beauty has grown strong to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly."
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