Naomi Wolf Quotes

I hate men who are in touch with their feminine side.

Women may think men have it all, but only because we've been socialized to express the emotions that are tied to this reality differently, which is to say, men are not to express the emotions that are tied to it.

There's so much toxic masculinity out there. I grew up with the notion that the more masculine you are and the less you show emotion, the more of a man you are.

I don't think men were meant to be interviewed.

You would never say to a man, 'do you like playing strong men?' You just wouldn't say that.

Growing up as a young man you're often told, 'You shouldn't cry,' and 'Emotions are weakness.' I think that's so damaging and I genuinely think that if we raised young boys better we wouldn't have such a need for feminism.

Once boys' and men's challenges are clear, the question 'why now' quickly becomes 'why didn't we see this sooner?' The answer? Virtually every society that survived did so by socializing its sons to be disposable.

Society says that men need to be bigger and stronger, and they must protect their women and so on.

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

The real victims of men are other men.

I'm saying that the depth of exploration of the male psyche and the female psyche is uneven. I see further, deeper renderings of what it means to be a man.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.

Men need to live and breathe women.

A lot of women - not all of them, a lot of them - feel insecure about men being men.

'Man up' is a sexist term that should be retired along with all the other gender-based imperious imperatives.

Most men are not that evolved.

It seems like women don't want men to be men anymore. They want men to be women. But they really don't want what they say they want. It's very weird.

I think it is too hard for men to talk about gender. We have to let men talk about this... because we need men to talk about this if it is ever going to change.

Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them; it's cut them off.

Men are recognizing that they have been forced to conform to a very narrow and rather two-dimensional picture of maleness and manhood that they have never had the freedom to question.

Men are actually the weaker sex.

I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.

No, feminism isn't 'over.' We need it not only to challenge injustice but because the whole gender expectations thing is bad for men, too.

Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not 'naturally' in charge as men.