On a mystical level, it was complete joy and happiness and there were — Naomi Wolf

"Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through mens eyes when deciding what provokes it."

"The books and films they see survey from the young boys point of view his first touch of a girls 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."

"The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as todays woman has become her beauty. Her reproductive value, as the aesthetic value of her face and body today, came to be seen as a sacred trust, one that she must constantly guard in the interest of her race."

"What 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 a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive."

"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."

"To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men arent is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women."