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"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."
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"We must dare to face the way in which patriarchal thinking blinds everyone so that we cannot see that the emotional lives of boys cannot be fully honored as long as notions of patriarchal masculinity prevail. We cannot teach boys that "real men" either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings."
"No wonder then that men who cared, who were open to change, often just gave up, falling back on the patriarchal masculinity they found so problematic. The individual men who did take on the mantle of a feminist notion of male liberation did so only to find that few women respected this shift. Once the 'new man' that is the man changed by feminism was represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful females who were secretly longing for his macho counterpart, masses of men lost interest."
"A horny man is seen. A horny woman is heard."
"Many women do not join organized resistance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed."
"To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."
"Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman."
"Oleanders have attractive flowers, they decorate nature beautifully, but they are poisonous; and a woman is an oleander; it's all right to watch her once in a while, but then you must walk away without touching her; if you ever try to taste her even once, you'll head for hell!"
"A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches."
"There is so much woman in many a girl and too much boy in many a man."
Explore more quotes by 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 is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact."
"Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken."
"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."
"Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - is innately disruptive of 'business as usual.' That is why it is effective."
"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."
"Women are not wrong if they react instinctively " often jealously " against their partner's interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman's destructive rival for her man's sexual capabilities."
"I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes economic pressure and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically."
"Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration."
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