Naomi Wolf Quotes

Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain's question: Is it safe here?

I argue that we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes economic pressure and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically.

Camille Paglia is: 'the nipple-pierced person's Phyllis Schlafly who poses as a sexual renegade but is in fact the most dutiful of patriarchal daughters.

Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration.

Some women have become far too proscriptive of other women's pleasures and private arrangements, and the definition of feminism has become ideologically overloaded.

What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem to obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?

Women are not wrong if they react instinctively – often jealously – against their partner’s interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman’s destructive rival for her man’s sexual capabilities.

We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.