Naomi Wolf

"its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him."

- Naomi Wolf

"Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it."

- Naomi Wolf

"Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together."

- Naomi Wolf

"Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so."

- Naomi Wolf

"A mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually vaccinates her daughter against low self-esteem."

- Naomi Wolf

"A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women _are_ insatiable. We _are_ greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we _would_ ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands _would_ begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world."

- Naomi Wolf

"Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience and resourcefulness."

- Naomi Wolf