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216726f
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By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women's status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values.
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Naomi Wolf |
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4a112b2
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Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women's pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.
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Naomi Wolf |
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da1e988
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The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect. More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation.
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perfection
freedom
liberty
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Naomi Wolf |
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e94cb4f
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The beauty myth posited to women a false choice: Which will I be, sexual or serious? We must reject that false and forced dilemma. Men's sexuality is taken to be enhanced by their seriousness; to be at the same time a serious person and a sexual being is to be fully human. Let's turn on those who offer this devil's bargain and refuse to believe that in choosing one aspect of the self we must thereby forfeit the other. In a world in which wo..
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Naomi Wolf |
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b81f75b
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The Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.
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Naomi Wolf |
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b2bfd26
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I thought of how many women told me dispiritedly about how their husbands waited for them to ask--or to make a list--and how demoralizing that was for them. I could not help thinking that there was some element of passive aggression in this recurrent theme of nice men, good, playful dads, full of initiative and motivation at work, who "waited to be asked" to do the more tedious baby-related work at home, until the asking was finally scaled ..
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Naomi Wolf |
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70ab7ec
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Sexuality follows fashion, which follows politics.
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sexuality
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Naomi Wolf |
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7b70e2b
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Dopamine can be read as the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain.
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Naomi Wolf |
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4842aed
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Let me use a second metaphor. Imagine that you found a tangle of seaweed on the edge of the shore and lifted it. The heaviest parts rest on the sand in a mesh, but some skeins extend vertically. This neural network is shaped like that: it looks like a tangled skein of a hundred thousand golden threads that has been drawn upward. The mass of it gathers in the pelvis, but strands from the same network extend upward to the spinal cord and brai..
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Naomi Wolf |
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61cf3de
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It is not biology alone but heroism too that drives women to find the will and grit and creativity to put one's own impulses aside to serve the needs of a tiny creature around the clock--especially in an environment in which that heroic choice is only casually acknowledged, much less honored, cherished, or assisted. I believe the myth about the ease and naturalness of mothering--the ideal of the effortlessly ever-giving mother--is propped u..
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Naomi Wolf |
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3b4b0d1
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Dieting makes women think of ourselves as sick, religious babies.
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Naomi Wolf |
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f73c888
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We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.
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beauty-myth
authentic-self
authentic-living
novels
painting
women-s-strength
artist
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Naomi Wolf |
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a33677b
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Porn puts people to sleep, conceptually and politically as well as erotically.
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Naomi Wolf |
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127b182
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Porn, it turns out, eventually takes the sexiness - that is, the wildness - out of sex.
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Naomi Wolf |
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2119d49
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The mass depiction of the modern woman as a "beauty" is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, "beauty" is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way "beauty" so directly contradicts women's real situation."
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society
media
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Naomi Wolf |
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476614e
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There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today's power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women.
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Naomi Wolf |
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224105a
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Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and then there is the "ideal." When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the ..
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feminism
love
our-shared-shelf
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Naomi Wolf |
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5dc0ce5
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We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution. As women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it waned to carry on its work of social control.
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Naomi Wolf |
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539a2f9
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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 fo..
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Naomi Wolf |
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4dbe09a
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Among the many incredible things about your incredible pelvic nerve and its lovely multiple branches is that, as we saw, it is completely unique for every individual woman on earth--no two women are alike.
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Naomi Wolf |
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118e387
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Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
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Naomi Wolf |
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d605abd
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For any one woman to outgrow the myth, she needs the support of many women. The toughest but most necessary change will come not from men or from the media, but from women, in the way we see and behave toward other women,
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Naomi Wolf |
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cda7114
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Images of strangled women, women in cages do not push any limits; they are a mainstream cliche of a mainstream social order. Rock music fails to live up to its subversive tradition when it eroticizes the same old establishment sadomasochism rather than playing with gender roles to make us look at them afresh
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Naomi Wolf |
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e3a7be9
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We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet by insisting on a new female reality on which to base a new metaphor for the earth: the female body with its own organic integrity that must be respected.
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feminism
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Naomi Wolf |
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ced3797
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It is painful for women to talk about beauty because under the myth, one woman's body is used to hurt another. Our faces and bodies become instruments for punishing other women, often used out of our control and against our will.
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Naomi Wolf |
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9ec47c0
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women who looked like fashion models--admitted to knowing, from the time they could first consciously think, that the ideal was someone tall, thin, white, and blond, a face without pores, asymmetry, or flaws, someone wholly "perfect," and someone whom they felt, in one way or another, they were not. I"
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Naomi Wolf |
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dd9f4dc
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The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fictions arose contemporaneously: a version of childhood that required continual maternal supervision; a concept of female biology that required middle-class women to act out the roles of hysterics and hypochondriacs; a conviction that respectable ..
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Naomi Wolf |
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cfd8d7f
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Women will be free of the beauty myth when we can choose to use our faces and clothes and bodies as simply one form of self-expression out of a full range of others. We can dress up for our pleasure, but we must speak up for our rights.
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Naomi Wolf |
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fa5beac
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When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women's faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? When someone discusses a woman's appearance to her face, she can ask herself, is it that person's business? Are the power relations equal? Would she feel comfortable making the same personal comments in return?
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Naomi Wolf |
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a0f24a1
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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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feminism
women
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Naomi Wolf |
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c838430
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Very nearly released by the spread of contraception, legal abortion, and the demise of the sexual double standard, that sexuality was quickly restrained once again by the new social forces of beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism, which arose to put the guilt, shame, and pain back into women's experience of sex.
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Naomi Wolf |
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0e4a3af
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something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.
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Naomi Wolf |
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b712385
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The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power.
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Naomi Wolf |
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79bb54c
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Advertisers are the West's courteous censors.
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Naomi Wolf |
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7ea67f1
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Women's writing is full ... of heartbreak with the injustices done by beauty--its presence as well as its absence.
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Naomi Wolf |
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93e91dc
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Women's writing is full ... with the injustices done by beauty--its presence as well as its absence.
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Naomi Wolf |
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8dd11a2
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Women's flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.
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Naomi Wolf |
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0ae5c59
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The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.
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Naomi Wolf |
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a78ec75
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when some of the neural "lights" in question have been switched off by injury, the outcome can be connected to a form of generalized depression, or what Dr. Jim Pfaus of Concordia University calls "anhedonia"--a state of pleasurelessness, bleakness, or grayness, in perceptions of the world."
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Naomi Wolf |
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6805e0f
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Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.' The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them),..
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too-real
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Naomi Wolf |
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0454f45
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Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well. The piled plate, the choicest cut, say: We think you're worth this much of the tribe's resources.
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Naomi Wolf |
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c44981d
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From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and "communist" academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nation's premier artists and writers had fled as well.11 The Nazi periodical The Nettle depicted this emigration as "a triumph for the German nation."12"
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Naomi Wolf |
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f0a9de7
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How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us. Maybe we will adorn ourselves with real delight, with the sense that we are gilding the lily. Maybe the less pain women inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from..
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Naomi Wolf |
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1f096f1
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The beauty myth generates low self-esteem for women and high profits for corporations as a result.
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Naomi Wolf |