Beauty Myth Quotes

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so. ~ Naomi Wolf

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles ... In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma ... The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972 ... The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time. ~ Naomi Wolf

An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth. Economist John Kenneth
Galbraith offers an economic explanation for "the persistence of the view of homemaking as a 'higher calling'": the concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminine Mystique, he feels, "has been forced on us by popular sociology, by magazines, and by fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our industrial society…. Behavior that is essential for economic reasons is transformed into a social virtue. ~ Naomi Wolf

Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance. ~ Naomi Wolf

Only then will women be able to talk about what "beauty" really involves: the attention of people we do not know, rewards for things we did not earn, sex from men who reach for us as for a brass ring on a carousel, hostility and scepticism from other women, adolescence extended longer than it ought to be, cruel aging, and a long hard struggle for identity. And we will learn that what is good about "beauty" - the promise of confidence, sexuality, and the self-regard of a healthy individuality - are actually qualities that have nothing to do with "beauty" specifically, but are deserved by and, as the myth is dismantled, available to all women. The best that "beauty" offers belongs to us all by right of femaleness. When we separate "beauty" from sexuality, when we celebrate the individuality of our features and characteristics, women will have access to a pleasure in our bodies that unites us rather than divides us. The beauty myth will be history. ~ Naomi Wolf

The problem with cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out exists only if women hate ourselves when we don't. When a woman is forced to adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming in order to protect her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must attract a lover so that she can take care of her children, that is exactly what makes "beauty" hurt. Because what hurts women about the beauty myth is not adornment, or expressed sexuality, or time spent grooming, or the desire to attract a lover. Many mammals groom, and every culture uses adornment. "Natural" and "unnatural" are not the terms in question. The actual struggle is between pain and pleasure, freedom and compulsion. ~ Naomi Wolf

The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power. ~ Naomi Wolf

There are, of course, real pleasures to be found in self-improvement. 'That the beauty idea is pleasurable AND demanding, and often concurrently, is a key feature,' Widdows writes. The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power, although this power has so far come at the expense of most others: porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men. But the pleasures of beauty work and the advent of mainstream feminism have both, in any case, mostly exacerbated the situation. If Wolf in 1990 criticized a paradigm where a woman was expected to look like her ideal self all the time, we have something deeper burrowing now - not a beauty myth but a lifestyle myth, a paradigm where a woman can muster all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually try to BECOME that idealized self, and where she can understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist - or just, without a question, the best way to live. ~ Jia Tolentino

The idea that beauty is unimportant is the real beauty myth. ~ Nancy Etcoff

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

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 women have real choices, the choices we make about our appearance will be taken at last for what they really are: no big deal. ~ Naomi Wolf

As 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 Wolf

The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it. ~ Konrad Lorenz

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. ~ Naomi Wolf

If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance. ~ Naomi Wolf

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation
latent fears that we might be going too far. ~ Naomi Wolf

Pain 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 Wolf

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. ~ Naomi Wolf

In 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote, in 'Beauty Myth,' about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women's subjugation has decreased. It's as if our culture has mustered an immune system response to continue breaking the fever of gender equality - as if some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty to makeup for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men. ~ Jia Tolentino

The awfulness of sudden death and the glory of heaven stunned me! The thing that had been mystery at twilight, lay clear, pure, open in the rosy hue of dawn. Out of the gates of the morning poured a light which glorified the palaces and pyramids, purged and purified the afternoon's inscrutable clefts, swept away the shadows of the mesas, and bathed that broad, deep world of mighty mountains, stately spars of rock, sculptured cathedrals and alabaster terraces in an artist's dream of color. A pearl from heaven had burst, flinging its heart of fire into this chasm. A stream of opal flowed out of the sun, to touch each peak, mesa, dome, parapet, temple and tower, cliff and cleft into the new-born life of another day.

I sat there for a long time and knew that every second the scene changed, yet I could not tell how. I knew I sat high over a hole of broken, splintered, barren mountains; I knew I could see a hundred miles of the length of it, and eighteen miles of the width of it, and a mile of the depth of it, and the shafts and rays of rose light on a million glancing, many-hued surfaces at once; but that knowledge was no help to me. I repeated a lot of meaningless superlatives to myself, and I found words inadequate and superfluous. The spectacle was too elusive and too great. It was life and death, heaven and hell. ~ Zane Grey

Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty. ~ Philip Yancey

The eloquence of a scientist is clarity; scientific truth is always more luminous when its beauty is unadorned than when it is tricked out in the embellishments with which our imagination would seek to clothe it. ~ Claude Bernard

Ma says that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,' Jeralene said. 'But that the Lord has put something pretty in everybody. ~ Ann H. Gabhart

Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves. ~ Langston Hughes

Why do I love you? Because you looked into my eyes and saw me. Behind the painted beauty, the forced expressions, the practiced gestures and habitual politeness, you saw me - the pure, vulnerable core that is my true essence. Somehow, in a kind but knowing glimpse you stripped away the façade, and I will never forget the relief it was to finally be seen. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

There's beauty in letting go. It doesn't have to be so painful. ~ Tessa Emily Hall

I'm a storyteller who uses all of the beauty and power of cinema to tell tales of human struggles for positive social change. ~ Pamela Yates

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young. ~ Anne Lamott

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness. ~ Benjamin N. Cardozo

If we are not willing to destroy the beauty we have created, we become slaves to it. ~ Moxie Mezcal

Lack of potatoes left a person's stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul. ~ Kate Morton

Beauty is the PR campaign of the soul. ~ Alex Shakar

The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other. ~ David Hume

Myths grow all the time. If I was to listen to the number of times I've thrown teacups then we've gone through some crockery in this place. It's completely exaggerated, but I don't like people arguing back with me. ~ Alex Ferguson

Health and beauty. What next? Look, kid, I make wine, not skin cream. ~ Nora Roberts

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. ~ Albert Einstein

There's her cousin, an she were not possessed with a fury, exceeds her as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December. ~ William Shakespeare

The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it. ~ Charles Williams

I shall eat anyone who tries to steal my singing, springing lark! ~ Jacob Grimm

Every morning I wake up with an unknown, unexplainable joy of life. Then I get lost in the beauty of the morning sun and all of the magnificence that surrounds me. ~ Debasish Mridha

There ought to be gardens for all months in the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season. ~ Francis Bacon

I enjoy the sun and the beauty of summer as long as I can. Who knows whether one of these days I shall not be prevented from doing it? ~ Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich Of Russia

His beauty hurt, but it was the pain that made it beautiful ~ S. Jae-Jones

But Fazire didn't do exactly what she said.
He did make her perfect.
He made her bright and funny and very, very
talented.
He made her sweet and thoughtful and very,
very caring.
He made her generous and kind and very, very
loving
He decided not to make her beautiful, at least
not at first, because she should know humility
and not grow up with conceit.
Though, she would become a beauty, a splendid
beauty beyond compare.
Just ... later. ~ Kristen Ashley

Every culture has a myth of the world before creation, and of the creation of the world [.]
These myths are tributes to human audacity. The chief difference between them and our modern scientific myth of the Big Bang is that science is self-questioning, and that we can perform experiments and observations to test our ideas. But those other creation stories are worthy of our deep respect. ~ Carl Sagan

Debunking the myth of the 'mean girl,' new research has found that boys use relational aggression - malicious rumors, social exclusion and rejection - to harm or manipulate others more often than girls. The longitudinal study followed a cohort of students from middle to high school and found that, at every grade level, boys engaged in relationally aggressive behavior more often than girls. ~ Anonymous

She saw him and didn't understand how she had ever missed his beauty. How it didn't always strike her as it did now, like a blow. ~ Marie Rutkoski

It was beautiful not despite but because of the friction it has had to endure. It had been thrashed around, but instead of being destroyed, it was improved with every scratch and scrape, sculpted. In fact, the scuffs themselves are what gave it its quiet splendor; they are responsible for turning a simple piece of glass (which could have just as easily been trash) into a gem. It wouldn't be the same without the wear and tear; it wouldn't be something pretty enough to be turned into jewelry if it hadn't been damn near broken. I closed my fist around this tear-shaped gem and thought about my own uneven edges, my own abrasions, and things I have endured that have, instead of breaking me, completed me, prepared me for the next tumble. Its odd beauty was hard-won. It came from reinventing itself. From having risen to the top of the discard pile. Like a phoenix, from victim to victor. (325) ~ Wendy Blackburn

The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature of ambition, the relationship of leaders to those they governed. The plays illuminated with stark beauty the dire consequences of civil strife, the evils wrought by jealousy and disloyalty, the emotions evoked by the death of a child, the sundering of family ties or love of country. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

She has the kind of beauty that shames your understanding of the word.
She is the waking dream I've had for so long. ~ Kirk Diedrich

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. ~ Andy Behrman

Take just ONE minute today and look around you and within you and try for just that minute to understand the utterly amazing miracle and incredible perfection and beauty you are experiencing and observing! ~ John Assaraf

Only the beautiful can acknowledge all that is beautiful, and only the ugly can acknowledge all that is ugly as being beautiful. ~ Suzy Kassem