“I’ll always owe The Beauty Myth a large part of my own feminist identity. But it’s not a fairy tale I’ll be handing to my own daughter.”— Rebecca Onion, slate.com
“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.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“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”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“To be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“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 the…”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com