Summary Of Naomi Wolf S The Bodies Of Others

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was invited to speak at the Southbank Centre in London as a part of the celebration of International Women’s Day. I was excited to be there, and was enjoying the bustle and excitement of the typical festival crowds. #2 I remember the sense of vertigo I felt when one of the young women at the rally, a student from Italy, told me that her country was shutting down. I understood that lockdown, the restriction of citizens’ liberties, only occurred under totalitarian systems.

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."

From New York Times bestselling author Naomi Wolf, Outrages explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced. Newly updated, first North American edition--a paperback original In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law. An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy. These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people’s private lives. In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’d written to another young man. Outrages chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds—who would become a poet, biographer, and critic—at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law. Drawing on the work of a range of scholars of censorship and of LGBTQ+ legal history, Wolf depicts how state censorship, and state prosecution of same-sex sexuality, played out—decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde—shadowing the lives of people who risked in new ways scrutiny by the criminal justice system. She shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and the painter Simeon Solomon. All the while, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet’s celebration of freedom, democracy, and unfettered love. Inspired by Whitman, and despite terrible dangers he faced in doing so, Symonds kept trying, stubbornly, to find a way to express his message—that love and sex between men were not “morbid” and deviant, but natural and even ennobling. He persisted in various genres his entire life. He wrote a strikingly honest secret memoir—which he embargoed for a generation after his death—enclosing keys to a code that the author had used to embed hidden messages in his published work. He wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared in his lifetime and would become foundational to our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and of LGBTQ+ legal rights. This essay is now rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is a critically important book, not just for its role in helping to bring to new audiences the story of an oft-forgotten pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights who could not legally fully tell his own story in his lifetime. It is also critically important for what the book has to say about the vital and often courageous roles of publishers, booksellers, and freedom of speech in an era of growing calls for censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. With Outrages, Wolf brings us the inspiring story of one man’s refusal to be silenced, and his belief in a future in which everyone would have the freedom to love and to speak without fear.

The Bodies of Others is about how we came to the harrowing civilizational crossroads at which we find ourselves - engaged in a war against vast impersonal forces with limitless power over our lives and which threaten the freedoms we have always taken for granted. In her most provocative book yet, Dr. Naomi Wolf shows how these forces—from Big Tech and Big Pharma to the CCP and our oligarchical elites—seized upon two years of COVID-19 panic in sinister new ways, to not only undermine our Republic but to fundamentally reorient human relations. Their target is humanity itself. Their end goal is to ensure that our pre-March 2020 world is gone forever. Irretrievable. To be replaced with a world in which all human endeavor—all human joy, all human fellowship, all human advancement, all human culture, all human song, all human drama, all worship, all surprise, all flirtation, all celebration—is behind a digital paywall. A world in which we will all have to ask technology's permission to be human. But we, the people of the world, did not vote to abandon our old systems and destroy our old ways so absolutely they could never be recovered. And Wolf shows how, against overwhelming odds, we still might win.

Every year, millions of women have their lives turned inside out by the experience of pregnancy. A contemporary woman find herself caught in an absurd paradox: while in the grip of one of the most primal, lonely, sensual and, in some ways, psychologically debilitating and physically dangerous experiences, she is overwhelmed by invasive, trivialising and infantilising cultural messages about what is happening to her - and who really owns the experience.

In Promiscuities, Naomi Wolf has written an exceptionally frank sexual memoir of an individual and a generation, and a call to women not only to reclaim but to celebrate their own sexual experiences, desires and histories.

"Promiscuities follows a group of adolescent girls as they gradually become aware of themselves as sexual beings and discover what our culture tells them being female means. Drawing on her own experiences as well those of her contemporaries, Naomi Wolf reveals the secrets of our coming of age: the sexual games, forbidden crushes, losses of virginity, and rites of initiation. She also uncompromisingly examines the darker territories of abortion, the influences of the sex industry, and sexual violence that underlie contemporary girl's struggle for womanhood. By bringing into light our relationship to the "shadow slut" that conditions our sexual development, Promiscuities explores how the sexual experiences of the adolescent years determine women's sense of their own value as adults, and envisions how we could better guide girls through the "normatively shocking" landscape they now inhabit. Finally, Wolf looks at the popular culture of the recent past, as well as at the history and mythology of female desire, to show how our "liberated" culture still fears and distorts female passion." "Bold and candid, funny and revelatory, Wolf's stories illustrate the fear and excitement, the fantasies and sometimes crippling realities, that make up a young contemporary woman's journey of erotic and emotional discovery."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The embarrassment and alienation we often feel when the word 'vagina' comes up in conversation is fairly new. In this book, Naomi Wolf explains why the vagina deserves an understanding of its own cultural lineage and ancestry because, what is true of the female body in general, is more true of the vagina than of any other feminine aspect.