THE

BEAUTY MYTH
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women is a nonfiction book
by Naomi Wolf, published in 1991 by William Morrow and Company. It was republished in 2002
by HarperPerennial with a new introduction.

The basic premise of The Beauty Myth is that as women have gained increased social power and
prominence, expected adherence to standards of physical beauty has grown stronger for women.
So many aspects of “the beauty myth” are, to make women feel less powerful;
in this case, just when their power, magnetism and sexuality are at their
height.

Summary
In her introduction, Wolf offers the following analysis:
“ The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly
and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...
[D]uring the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating
disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing
specialty... [P]ornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films
and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers
that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More
women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have
ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may
actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.[1] ”
Wolf also posits the idea of an iron maiden, an intrinsically unattainable standard that is then used to
punish women physically and psychologically for their failure to achieve and conform to it. Wolf
criticizes the fashion and beauty industries as exploitative of women, but claims the beauty myth
extends into all areas of human functioning. Wolf writes that women should have "the choice to do
whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using
attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to
undermine us psychologically and politically". Wolf argued that women were under assault by the
"beauty myth" in five areas:work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Ultimately, Wolf argues for a
relaxation of normative standards of beauty.[2]

Impact[edit]
Wolf's book was a quick bestseller, garnering intensely polarized responses from the public and
mainstream media, but winning praise from many feminists. Second-wave feminist Germaine
Greer wrote that The Beauty Myth was "the most important feminist publication since The Female
Eunuch", and Gloria Steinem wrote, "The Beauty Myth is a smart, angry, insightful book, and a
clarion call to freedom. Every woman should read it."[3] British novelist Fay Weldon called the book
"essential reading for the New Woman",[4]and Betty Friedan wrote in Allure magazine that "The
Beauty Myth and the controversy it is eliciting could be a hopeful sign of a new surge of feminist
consciousness."

With the publication of The Beauty Myth, Wolf became a leading spokesperson of what was later
described as the third wave of the feminist movement.

Criticism[edit]
Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the claim that 150,000 women were dying
every year from anorexia.[5] Sommers claimed that the actual number is closer to 100, a figure which
others, such as Jennifer Baumgardner[citation needed] and Amy Richards,[citation needed] claimed to be much too
low. In the same interview, Sommers stated that Wolf had retracted the figure. Jeanine Cogan, PhD,
claims that the death totals may be underreported because death certificates don’t cite eating
disorders per se as a cause of death.[6]

Similarly, a scathing 2004 paper compared Wolf's eating disorder statistics to statistics from peer-
reviewed epidemiological studies and concluded that 'on average, an anorexia statistic in any edition
of the The Beauty Myth should be divided by eight to get near the real statistic.' Schoemaker
calculated that there are about 525 annual deaths from AN, 286 times less than Wolf's statistic.[7]

Humanities scholar Camille Paglia also criticized the book, arguing that Wolf's historical research
and analysis was deeply flawed.[8]

Connection to Women Studies[edit]

According to some Women's Studies scholars,[who?] the Beauty Myth is simply a myth, but its
existence is a powerful force in keeping women focused on the purist of beauty and providing both
men and women with a way to judge and limit women due to their physical appearance. Magazines,
posters, television ads and social media sites are, on this hypothesis, only some of the many
platforms today that perpetuate beauty standards for both men and women. The daily presence and
circulation of these platforms, it is argued, makes escaping these ideals almost impossible. Women
and men alike are faced with ideal bodies, bodies that are marketed as attainable through diets and
gym memberships. However, critics allege that often times for women many of the beauty standards
are neither healthy nor achievable through diets. These unattainable goals are then cited as an
explanation for the increasing rates of plastic surgery. Women’s ideals often place a larger
importance on weight loss than on maintain a healthy medium. A common belief of women[vague] is
that the lower the number on the weight scale, the prettier she’ll be regardless of what sacrifices her
body needs to make. These ends to the sacrifices often outweigh the means as failing to embody
these ideals leaves women targets to criticism and societal scrutiny.

Anorexia nervosa is one of the most prevalent eating disorders in Western countries “affecting an
estimated 2.5 million people in the United States alone[9]”. Of this number, more than 90 percent of
anorexics are girls and young women. Anorexia nervosa is a “serious mental health disease that
involves compulsive dieting and drastic weight loss”. This weight loss is the result of deliberate self-
starvation to achieve a thinner appearance; an ideal that is heavily policed for young women today.
Anorexia nervosa’s deep psychological roots make it difficult to treat elongating the recovery process
to a life-long journey.

Many feminists believe that the beauty myth is one of the last and most successful systems in place
to keep male dominance. According to Naomi Wolf, for example, as women increasingly focus their
attention on their physical appearance, the focus on equal rights and treatment takes second priority.
The same is argued in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in which she recounts the effects of
societies conditioning of young women into performing femininity. The focus of this passage is on a
young girl who’s unaware of the differences that exist between her body and that of her male friends.
During her adolescent years, the girl realizes not only to what degree her body is physically
changing but also how these changes have begun to impact her freedom. According to Beauvoir,
these changes encompass a “huge array of social expectations including physical appearance but
unlike the social expectations on boys, the social expectations on girls and women usually inhibit
them from acting freely[10]”. In her argument, Beauvoir cites things such as clothing, make-up, diction
and manners as subjects of scrutiny women face that men do not.

Studies reveal that women today strive to achieve beauty ideas because they understand the
correlation between aesthetic beauty and social standing. According to Dr. Vivian Diller's book Face
it: What Women Really Feel as their Looks Change and What to do About It, "most women agree,
reporting the good looks continue to be associated with respect, legitimacy, and power in their
relationships[11]". Basing hiring, evaluations and promotions off physical appearance is only further
policing women to place aesthetic beauty before their work and skills.
Over the course of history, beauty ideals for women have changed drastically to represent
societal views.[12] During slavery, race and skin color were the main factors for being
considered beautiful. White women and women with fair skin were seen as the ideal body
further segregating women into subgroups and justifying the unfair treatment of black
women. In the early 1900’s, the ideal female body type changed to represent the pale
complexion, cinched-waist ideal; freckles, sun spots, and/or skin imperfections led to
scrutiny by other. In 1920, women with a thinner frame and small bust were seen as beautiful,
the desperation to reach such a standard led to an increase in eating disorders such as
anorexia and bulimia. The ideal body time we have today of full-chested and hourglass
figures began in the early 1950’s and has since led to a spike in plastic surgery and eating
disorders. As illustrated by the aforementioned changes, beauty standards are shifting
socially constructed ideas imposed on women.

The Beauty Myth Summary

The Beauty Myth

The basic premise of THE BEAUTY MYTH is that forced adherence to standards of
physical beauty has grown stronger for women as they gained power in other societal
arenas. Wolf argues that this standard of beauty has taken over the work of social
coercion formerly left to myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity,
all of which have been used to keep women powerless. In the author’s view, “the gaunt,
youthful model [has] supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful
womanhood.” The myth of beauty spreads the belief that an objective measurement of
beauty exists, and that woman must want to embody it, and that men must want such
women.

However, Wolf contends that the beauty myth is really not about women, it is about
men’s institutions and power. Beauty is about behavior, not appearance. The qualities
labelled “beautiful” in women in any given time period are no more than symbols of
female behavior considered desirable at that time. Besides weakening women
psychologically, the beauty myth feeds a multibillion-dollar cosmetics industry, and
keeps women from rising too high in the workplace by offering a way around
antidiscrimination laws.

THE BEAUTY MYTH is an impassioned book. While occasionally didactic, it is carefully

thought out and backed by exhaustive research. Wolf offers chapters on how the beauty
myth functions at work, in the media and culture, in the religious sphere, and in sex and
sexual relations; she also discusses relationship to violence against women by men and
by women themselves in the form of eating disorders and cosmetic surgery. In a final
chapter Wolf calls for a third wave of feminism that will dismantle the societal machinery
that enforces adherence to the beauty myth.

References[edit]
1. The Beauty Myth. pp. 10
2. The Beauty Myth, pp. 17-18, 20, 86, 131, 179, 218.
3. Reviews
4. Kim Hubbard, The Tyranny of Beauty, To Naomi Wolf, Pressure to Look Good Equals
Oppression, People, June 24, 1991.
5. "Has Feminism Gone Too Far?". Retrieved 2007-07-27.
6. http://www.bulimia.com/client/client_pages/eating_disorders_awareness_edr15_1.cfm
7. "A critical appraisal of the anorexia statistics in The Beauty Myth: introducing Wolf's Overdo and Lie
Factor (WOLF).". Eat Disord 12 (2): 97–102.
2004. doi:10.1080/10640260490444619.PMID 16864310.
8. Parks, Peggy J (2009). Anorexia. San Diego, CA: ReferencePoint Press. pp. 6–
10. ISBN 9781601520425.
9. Scholz, Sally J. (2010). Feminism : a beginner's guide. Oxford: Oneworld. pp. 158–
164. ISBN 9781851687121.
10. ^ Willens, Vivian Diller with Jill Muir-Sukenick ; edited by Michele (2011). Face it : what women really
feel as their looks change and what to do about it : a psychological guide to enjoying your appearance
at any age (3rd ed. ed.). Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House. ISBN 9781401925413.
 11. Ryle, Robyn (2012). Questioning gender : a sociological exploration. Thousand Oaks, Calif.:
SAGE/Pine Forge Press. ISBN 9781412965941.

When my book was published in 1991, I noted that a burgeoning epidemic of

eating disorders was engulfing what should have been the feistiest, most
confident generation of women ever. The field of cosmetic surgery, especially
breast implant procedures, was booming. Pornography was chipping away at
young women’s sexual self-esteem just as insult-ridden advertisements for
anti-aging creams were shaping the way women thought about the experience
of getting older. The way we looked determined our value to society.

Since then, many of the issues I warned about have, indeed, gotten worse. The
body size of fashion models and starlets has dropped still further; fashion ads
showcase women who look as if they should be hospitalized. The technologies
of cosmetic surgery have become so commonplace that there are communities
in which women with unreconstructed faces are seen as bucking the norm.
Breast surgery is almost universal in pornography, and pornography is almost
universal in the sexual coming-of-age of both young women and young men;
those images now have greater impact than they did when I wrote the book.

One would have thought that with all of this trending “worse” that the fear of
aging would be worse, as well. But despite these pressures, a substantial
subset of women are simply not buying the hype. In 2004, beauty brand Dove
commissioned an international study to see how women felt about themselves
and what it meant to be beautiful. Their results demonstrated that about 17
percent of women felt more trapped than ever by the ideals of attractiveness;
about 53 percent have good days and bad days. The rest, about 30 percent, are
“change agents” who are defining beauty for themselves.

Today, the notion that beauty ideals are socially constructed, manipulated by
advertisers and marketed for profit motives is part of the conventional
wisdom, not a fringe argument. Smart advertisers for beauty products court
women’s raised confidence, and few use the hectoring, insulting tone of the
early ’90s, when anti-age cream manufacturers would refer to wrinkles as
“lesions” and aging as a “disease,” and the standard ad image was a barely
middle-aged woman looking, stricken, into her mirror, as if finding her first
wrinkle was the equivalent of getting word of a terminal illness.

The rhetoric today is focused on being as healthy as possible, whatever one’s

size, rather than attaining an artificially low body weight. Celebrities such as
Queen Latifah and Jennifer Hudson use this language of fitness, rather than
thinness, in talking about their weight goals. There is also a new skepticism
among women of all ages about the role of the old gatekeepers of the beauty
myth. Fashion arbiters such as Vogue editor Anna Wintour used to set a bar
for style; today, there is a far greater sense that what you see on the street, in
surfing the Web, in a friend’s delightful outfit, is just as powerful. A co-worker
who has let her hair go fabulously gray in a flattering cut, or wears
enchantingly offbeat glasses, can be as great an influence as the September
issue of Vogue. Fashion brands and magazines are now simply a subset of the
many influences around women, competing for their attention rather than
dictating how they should look and, more dangerously, how they should feel.

The fear of aging was certainly bad when I was 26. When “The Beauty Myth”
was published, girls were still learning that they would, like hothouse flowers,
bloom briefly in their late teens to mid-20s. After that? Well, it was a steady
decline, as the power we derived from our physical appearance dwindled. Our
only hope to hang on to an increasingly precarious sexuality and sense of self-
esteem lay in magical potions and powders, or perhaps in the surgeon’s hands.
Older women were encouraged to see their younger counterparts as threats
and usurpers, and young women were expected to see the women who should
have been their mentors and role models as faded has-beens, harbingers of
their own future decay.

I personally expected that when I entered the middle of my life, I would start
to mourn my youthful physical self and that, even though I had thought long
and hard about the dangers of the beauty myth, I would feel a sense of
existential loss of self when my appearance began to change.

But I am coming out with this and hope that many midlife women will join
me: Those pangs of loss have largely not happened. Not for me and not for the
women I know and admire.

When I am at a social occasion, the showstoppers are no longer the young

beauties in their 20s. Rather, those who draw all the light in the room are the
women of great accomplishment and personal charisma — and these are
usually women in midlife. (Indeed, at events I have attended recently, cadres
of conventionally beautiful young women seem now to be treated almost like
wallpaper or like the catering staff.)

The change in social norms around the issue of women’s aging is immense.
There is now an influential and growing demographic of educated, well-off
women whose status, sense of self-esteem and sexual cachet rise rather than
fall as they head toward midlife. I do not see younger women looking at
accomplished women in their 40s with pity or derision: I see them looking
ahead with admiration and even envy.
The archetype of the Evil Queen and Sleeping Beauty has been laid to rest.
Many older women no longer see younger women as rivals in the same way. “I
have empathy for them,” said one 54-year-old psychologist. “I want to mentor
younger women, not compete with them,” remarked another friend, a 48-year-
old photographer. These women liked themselves far more in midlife than
they had at an earlier age, and the older women saw younger women
struggling with the same issues of self-awareness they had faced in their own
youth.

Because of advances in health and well-being awareness, many women I know

are entering midlife feeling as good as (and looking better than) they did in
college. But they also have professional success, self-knowledge, sexual
magnetism and awareness, and even thriving children, admiring husbands or
ardent lovers. These signs of accomplishment merely add to the allure of many
midlife women — women who, when asked if they would like to be in their 20s
again, think of doing so with a shudder.

Certainly some men my age still date or marry younger, as our friend at the
party sought to do; but in my own circles, at least, it is considered more macho
for a man to have an accomplished woman his own age on his arm. His ego, it
is understood, can take it. When I asked my single male peers why they were
dating or having relationships with women their own ages rather than younger
women, I heard variants of this: “Today, someone isn’t less cool as she gets
older. She is just as cool or cooler. And, if a woman is taking care of herself,
there isn’t really a difference sexually between a younger and an older woman
— except that the older woman is more comfortable with herself and more
sure of herself.” As one eligible man in his mid-40s put it, laughing, when he
described why he was only attracted to women his own age, “I get a brain and
a body!”
It is true that “taking care of herself” is not an insignificant issue. But that kind
of self-care is not about being enslaved to external “beauty myth” pressures: It
is about loving yourself, valuing your unique body and looking after it
accordingly.

***

At midlife, the social “script” insists that we’re supposed to adopt a rueful tone
— Oh, that first crow’s-foot, that first strand of gray. It’s simply more
acceptable for women to be self-deprecating about the signs of aging. But
when was the last time you heard an older woman say, in public — “Actually,
getting older is more than tolerable — it’s great!” Let alone: “I really like it.”

So, at the risk of sounding socially incorrect, I am going to deviate from that
script, and I invite all women of a certain age to join me. A great many of us
don’t feel particularly wistful or rueful about our earlier physical selves. A
great many of us really like where we are.

I like where I am.

Sure, I am startled when I forget to put a color rinse in my hair, and I look into
the bathroom mirror and see a sheen of gray. But I look at it with a kind of
gentle curiosity: So that is what that will be like! Certainly, it takes more effort
at the gym to maintain a certain level of fitness. But at midlife, you also know
what an incredible gift a healthy body is. And while I don’t love working
harder for an outcome, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for a body that can
move and hike and swim, seduce and be seduced, be exhilarated and
overjoyed, and all of this in the blessing of being free of serious illness. A 59-
year-old teacher said: “I’d rather look great for who I am than try to look 19. I
feel happier in my skin than I did when I was younger.”
I asked a therapist who works with midlife women, “In your experience, is it
true or not true that women get depressed about their appearance as they get
older?”

“It is a myth,” she said. “You know more about staying fit. You know more
about what feels good to wear. You are more able to like the way you look.”

There are many other delightful surprises about being at this stage on the
journey. I don’t miss the brutal sexual harassment that young women receive
from men — and I love the far gentler flirtation or civil compliments from cab
drivers and park chess players my own age or older. On the street, young
women are told: Give me some. Older women hear: I love your eyes. That is
not a bad trade.

I know — finally — what I like to wear and am comfortable not bothering with
what I don’t. I love not being in physical competition with other women. I love
being able to appreciate the beauty of other women and feeling appreciated
myself — and appreciating myself.

To anxious young women, I want to say what I wish more older women had
said to my generation: Relax, enjoy the journey and do not worry about the
future. There are no wicked witches. It is all good. Really, really good.

And it only gets better.

BIO SKETCH OF AUTHOR

BOOK

SUMMARY

CHARACTER SKETCH
CRITICAL APPRECIATION

CONCLUSION