# Quote — Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

> A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

- Author: [Naomi Wolf](https://www.leafyquotes.com/naomi-wolf.md)
- Book: [The Beauty Myth](https://www.leafyquotes.com/naomi-wolf/the-beauty-myth.md)
- Page: 187
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf#The_Beauty_Myth_(1991)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/naomi-wolf/the-beauty-myth/a-culture-fixated

## More from this book

> 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.

p. 254 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/naomi-wolf/the-beauty-myth/pain-is-real.md)

> The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it.

p. 157 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/naomi-wolf/the-beauty-myth/the-books-and.md)

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

p. 45 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/naomi-wolf/the-beauty-myth/beauty-provokes-harassment.md)