Demographically, I'm a hippie from San Francisco and I'm not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power.
Naomi WolfWhat editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.
Naomi Wolf...When we quietly go about our business as our rights are plundered, when we yield to passivity and switch on the wii and hand over our power, we are not acting like true Americans. Indeed, at those moments we are giving up our citizenship.
Naomi WolfI am delighted to be joining 'Guardian U.S.''s team as a weekly columnist, and to have the chance to address American and global current events on its distinguished platform. 'Guardian U.S.' brings the 'Guardian''s hard-hitting investigative brand to a new focus on American news and opinion.
Naomi WolfDocumentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.
Naomi WolfWith the Internet there is even more fractioning since we are in echo chambers. With so much propaganda it is hard to calm down enough to listen.
Naomi WolfAs soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.
Naomi WolfIn drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.
Naomi WolfThe real fight isn't left or right but between forces of democracy across the spectrum and the forces of tyranny.
Naomi WolfWhen people get this consciousness of the way things are supposed to be in America - that the locus of agency is in them, that they are supposed to be the ones setting the agenda - if people believe this, they get very energized. Yeah, it's annoying to have this extra burden of saving the country.
Naomi WolfLiberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well.
Naomi WolfI don't want to overstate tantra because I'm sure there are scumbags everywhere, but it seems like it's an ideology that actually respects female desire.
Naomi WolfPain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.
Naomi WolfWe need people to be alert and thinking for themselves and connected to each other and connected to that sense of hope and empowerment and radical chutzpah that the founding generation had and intended us to have.
Naomi WolfCosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.
Naomi WolfWhen a leader has deployed a private army, that is one definition of a police state. Another is when the president, or a leader, has his own treasury.
Naomi WolfWomen who are beautiful or who achieve beauty according to the imposed standards are rewarded; those who cannot or choose not to be beautiful are punished, economically and socially.
Naomi WolfFor I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.
Naomi WolfThe Tea Party is not monolithic. There is a battle between people who care about liberty and the Constitution and the Republican Establishment who is trying to take ownership of it and redirect it for its own purposes.
Naomi WolfWhat becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her 'beauty' his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.
Naomi WolfWhen [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.
Naomi WolfMost urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.
Naomi WolfWe need to get back into grappling with people we disagree with if we want to restore the Republic.
Naomi WolfThe 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.
Naomi WolfI've never understood this puritanical idea that feminism has to be a cult. You know, we all have to think alike or dress alike or have a similar ideology.
Naomi WolfBeauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.
Naomi WolfIs the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.
Naomi WolfIt is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.
Naomi WolfThe idea that women are innately gentle is a fantasy, and a historically recent one. Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, is depicted as wreathed in male human skulls; the cruel entertainments of the Romans drew audiences as female as they were male; Boudicca led her British troops bloodily into battle.
Naomi WolfIt is important to distinguish between the power of the internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers.
Naomi WolfA culture fixation 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 WolfPeople of all kinds are waking up. Even people passionate for Obama realize even that knight on a white horse isn't enough to roll back the oligarchy. I'm seeing a lot of action on the left as well that is never reported. But the Tea Party response is the most visible and the initiative they show is the most recognizable.
Naomi WolfExcellence, to me, is the state of grace that can descend only when one tunes out all the world's clamor, listens to an inward voice one recognizes as wiser than one's own, and transcribes without fear.
Naomi WolfThe surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.
Naomi WolfSpokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.
Naomi WolfCitizens who live or work near protest sites or marches have every right to be free of violence from protesters, and they should never be subjected to destruction of property.
Naomi WolfWestern women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.
Naomi WolfThe stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.
Naomi WolfFrom a constitutional point of view George W. Bush passing through the Patriot Act is no worse than Obama renewing it.
Naomi WolfThe media needs to tell a story. And whenever there's a new generation, you know, with a new conversation, it's handy to say well, these are the angry young men, these are the hippies, these are the boomers.
Naomi WolfFrankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism.
Naomi WolfIt is fairly well-known what has been behind that climate change denial in America: vast sums pumped into an ignorance industry by the oil and gas lobbies.
Naomi Wolf