Is 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 Wolf
About This Quote

The beauty myth is a symptom of misogyny, the belief that women are inferior to men. It’s a belief that men shouldn’t love women because they’re inferior to them. This myth exists in many forms, but the general idea is that men should be driven by their libido and not feel any romantic or sexual attraction to women. This myth stems from the idea that female beauty is a thing that men should desire.

As a result, only men are driven by their libido and as a result, they don’t have to worry about feeling sexual attraction for other women. This myth teaches men to ignore women, as well as teaching them how to avoid loving them or being loved by them.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection - Sharon Salzberg

  2. In youth, it was a way I had, To do my best to please. And change, with every passing lad To suit his theories. But now I know the things I know And do the things I do, And if you do not like me... - Dorothy Parker

  3. You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and... - Sharon Salzberg

  4. That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>It's true, we're... - Jim Morrison

  5. It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being. - John Joseph Powell

More Quotes By Naomi Wolf
  1. Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies, " two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external...

  2. You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all.

  3. 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...

  4. ...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.

  5. [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...

Related Topics