We as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women.
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Naomi Wolf
Naomi R. Wolf (born November 12, 1962) is an American author, journalist and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Wolf first came to prominence in 1991 as the author of The Beauty Myth. With the book, she became a leading spokeswoman of what was later described as the third wave of the feminist movement. Such leading feminists as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised the book; others, including bell hooks, Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers, criticized it. She has since written other books, including the bestselling book The End of America in 2007 and her latest Vagina: A New Biography. Her journalism career began in 1995 and has included topics such as abortion, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Edward Snowden and ISIS. She has written in venues such as The Nation, The Guardian and The Huffington Post. Writers in Salon.com, National Review, Alternet, Mother Jones and The Atlantic have for some time criticized her journalism as conspiratorial and overblown. 2Childhood, education and personal life Wolf was born in San Francisco, to a Jewish family. Her mother is Deborah Goleman, an anthropologist and the author of The Lesbian Community. Her father is the Romanian-born gothic horror scholar and Yiddish translator Leonard Wol
To enter the transcendental state that takes the female brain into “high” orgasm, you absolutely need to feel safe; safe from “bad stress,” in the sense of knowing you are entering a trance state in the presence of someone who will protect you if necessary at the very least, and not endanger you or…
One could say that she actually becomes, biochemically, a wild woman or a maenad. She becomes so disinhibited and impervious to pain that it is as if she is in a state of altered consciousness. Women in “high” orgasm go more deeply into this trance state than at any other time. Judgment is suspended…
The full melting response or “high orgasm” in women—which I would define (though our language around female sexual response is so inadequate) as that kind of orgasm that most intensely induces the most complete possible trance state and that most involves all the body systems, so that afterward the…
The autonomic nervous system also responds to a woman’s sense of safety or danger. It sends the signals to the brain and then to the body that one is safe, so one can relax, eat, and digest; or relax and sleep; or relax and make love.
That’s what explained vaginal versus clitoral orgasms? Neural wiring? Not culture, not upbringing, not patriarchy, not feminism, not Freud?
The woman who dies thinnest, with the fewest wrinkles, wins.
What is beautiful about her body does not belong to her, but to god. But what is ugly is hers alone, proof of her sin, worthy of any abuse.
Why do women care so much what the magazines say and show? They care because, though magazines are trivialized, they represent something very important: women's mass culture
Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society.
To be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility.
The working woman was told she had to think about 'beauty' in a way that undermined, step for step, the way she had begun to think as a result of the successes of the women's movement. This last vital lie applied to individual women's lives the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action…
What it needed was a replacement shackle, a new material burden that would drain surplus energy and lower confidence, an ideology that would produce the women workers it needs, but only in the mold in which it wants them.
In the West, where paid labor centers on a forty-hour week, the unavoidable fact to confront the power structure is that women newcomers came from a group used to working more than twice as hard and long as men. And not only for less pay; for none.
Aging in women is "unbeautiful" since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span.