Name: The beauty myth
ISBN: 9780099861904

Naomi Wolf

how images of beauty are used against women

The beauty myth

Kirsty Connell

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

Since the family was a productive unit and women’s work complemented men’s, the value of women who were not aristocrats or prostitutes lay in their work skills, economic shrewdness, physical strength, and fertility. Physical attraction, obviously, played its part; but “beauty” as we understand it was not, for ordinary women, a serious issue in the marriage marketplace. The beauty myth in its modern form gained ground after the upheavals of industrialization, as the work unit of the family was destroyed, and urbanization and the “emerging factory system demanded what social engineers of the time termed the “separate sphere” of domesticity, which supported the new labor category of the “breadwinner” who left home for the workplace during the day. The middle class expanded, the standards of living and of literacy rose, the size of families shrank; a new class of literate, idle women developed, on whose submission to enforced domesticity the evolving system of industrial capitalism depended. Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about “beauty” date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.

Declining postwar birthrates and the resulting shortage of skilled labor means that women are welcome to the labor pool: as expendable, nonunionized, low-paid pink-collar-ghetto drudges. Economist Marvin Harris described women as a “literate and docile” labor pool, and “therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.” The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool’s workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.

By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values. Throughout the decade, as money’s ability to buy time for comfort and leisure was abandoned in the stratospheric pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake, the competition for “beauty” saw a parallel inflation: The material pleasures once presented as its goals—sex, love, intimacy, self-expression—were lost in a desperate struggle within a sealed economy, becoming distant and quaint memories.

No woman is so beautiful—by definition—that she can be confident of surviving a new judicial process that submits the victim to an ordeal familiar to women from other trials: looking her up and down to see how what happened to her is her own fault. Since there is nothing “objective” about beauty, the power elite can, whenever necessary, form a consensus to strip “beauty” away. To do that to a woman publicly from a witness stand is to invite all eyes to confirm her ugliness, which then becomes the reality that all can see. This process of legal coercion ensures that a degrading public spectacle can be enacted at her expense against any woman in any profession if she charges discrimination by beauty.

This request for display behavior is unspoken. It is subtle enough so that the woman cannot point to it, credibly, as an example of harassment (to be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility). It usually leaves the toyed-with “beauty” no choice, short of a withdrawal so obvious as to give certain offense, but to play along. She may have to will her body to relax and not stiffen at an untoward compliment, or simply have to sit up straighter, letting her body be seen more clearly, or brush the hair from her eyes in a way that she knows flatters her face. Whatever it is she has to do, she knows it without being told, from the expression and body language of the powerful man in whose eyes her future lies.

Though many writers have pointed out that women’s magazines reflect historical change, fewer examine how part of their job is to determine historical change as well. Editors do their jobs well by reading the Zeitgeist; editors of women’s magazines—and, increasingly, mainstream media as well—must be alert to what social roles are demanded of women to serve the interests of those who sponsor their publication. Women’s magazines for over a century have been one of the most powerful agents for changing women’s roles, and throughout that time—today more than ever—they have consistently glamorized whatever the economy, their advertisers, and, during wartime, the government, needed at that moment from women.

When the restless, isolated, bored, and insecure housewife fled the Feminine Mystique for the workplace, advertisers faced the loss of their primary consumer. How to make sure that busy, stimulated working women would keep consuming at the levels they had done when they had all day to do so and little else of interest to occupy them? A new ideology was necessary that would compel the same insecure consumerism; that ideology must be, unlike that of the Feminine Mystique, a briefcase-sized neurosis that the working woman could take with her to the office. To paraphrase Friedan, why is it never said that the really crucial function that women serve as aspiring beauties is to buy more things for the body? Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that they will buy more things if they are kept in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring “beauties.”

Women’s sense of liberation from the older constraints of fashion was countered by a new and sinister relationship to their bodies, as, writes historian Roberta Pollack Seid, “Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles.” Stripped of their old expertise, purpose, and advertising hook, the magazines invented—almost completely artificially—a new one. In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a “problem” where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on women’s natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma. The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972. Articles on dieting in the popular press soared from 60 in the year 1979 to 66 in the month of January 1980 alone. By 1983–84, the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature listed 103 articles; by 1984, 300 diet books were on the shelves. The lucrative “transfer of guilt” was resurrected just in time.

Though many women realized that their attention was being focused in this way, fewer fully understood how thoroughly politically such focusing works: In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women’s identification with the issues. If the public woman is stigmatized as too “pretty,” she’s a threat, a rival—or simply not serious; if derided as too “ugly,” one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda. The political implications of the fact that no woman or group of women, whether housewives, prostitutes, astronauts, politicians or feminists, can survive unscathed the no-win scrutiny of the beauty myth are not yet reorganized in their full dimensions so the divide-and-conquer dreamwork was effective. 

The new wave of post–women’s movement magazines gained ground from the anxiety that such caricature provoked in achieving women. Nonetheless, the new wave—initiated in 1965 by the revamped Cosmopolitan—is indeed revolutionary compared with the earlier service magazines that Friedan had attacked. Their formula includes an aspirational, individualist, can-do tone that says that you should be your best and nothing should get in your way; a focus on personal and sexual relationships that affirms female ambition and erotic appetite; and sexualized images of female models that, though only slightly subtler than those aimed at men, are meant to convey female sexual liberation. But the formula must also include an element that contradicts and then undermines the overall prowoman fare: In diet, skin care, and surgery features, it sells women the deadliest version of the beauty myth money can buy.

Women also respond to the beauty myth aspect of the magazines because adornment is an enormous—and often pleasing—part of female culture. And there is almost nowhere else where they can participate in women’s culture in so broad a way. The myth does not only isolate women generationally, but because it encourages women’s wariness of one another on the basis of their appearance, it tries to isolate them from all women they do not know and like personally. Though women have networks of intimate friends, the myth, and women’s conditions until recently, have kept women from learning how to do something that makes all male social change possible: How to identify with unknown other women in a way that is not personal.

A week with the Unification Church reads like such a woman’s journal. As Appel puts it: The effort to try to learn the required response to gain approval, combined with lack of sleep, inadequate nutrition, and constant activity that allows for no rest or reflection, begins to take a toll. The guests lose their critical faculties. Exhausted and emotionally overwrought, they find it easier to lie low, keep quiet, and not provoke the anger and disapproval of the group by asking questions and expressing doubts about the world view they are being asked to embrace.

Women were primed to receive the Rites by their historical relationship to the Church. Since the Industrial Revolution, the “separate sphere” to which women were relegated specifically assigned piety to femininity. That in turn justified middle-class women’s separation from public life: Since women were designated as being “the pure sex,” they could be obliged to stay out of the common fray, preoccupied with maintaining that purity. In the same way, women today are designated as the “beautiful” sex, which relegates them to a similarly useful preoccupation with protecting that “beauty.”

This prevents women from fully inhabiting the body, keeping us waiting for an apotheosis that will never arrive. It is meant to keep us from being at ease in the flesh or in the present, those two erotically and politically dangerous places for a woman to be; mourning the past and fearing the future, pacified.

Discussions of obscenity, or nakedness, or community standards do not address the harm done to women by this development: the way in which “beauty” joins pornographic conventions in advertising, fashion photography, cable TV, and even comic books to affect women and children. Men can choose to enter an adult bookstore; women and children cannot choose to avoid sexually violent or beauty-pornographic imagery that follows them home.

How did this disastrous definition of sexuality arise? “Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both “beautiful” and “sexual” constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent “invention. When society needed chastity from women, virginity and fidelity endowed women with beauty (religious fundamentalist Phyllis Schlafly recently reasserted that sex outside marriage destroyed women’s beauty), and their sexuality did not exist: Peter Gay shows that Victorian women were assumed to be “sexually anaesthetic,” and Wendy Faulkner quotes the conviction of Victorian writers that middle-class women were “naturally frigid.” Only recently, now that society is best served by a population of women who are sexually available and sexually insecure, “beauty” has been redefined as sex. Why? Because, unlike female sexuality, innate to all women, “beauty” is hard work, few women are born with it, and it is not free.

The woman’s value as a fetish lies in the way her “beauty” gives him status in the eyes of other men. So when a man has sex with a woman whom he has chosen for her impersonal beauty alone, there are many people in the room with him, but she is not among them. These relationships disappoint both because both must live in public to get that constant, recharging affirmation of the woman’s high exchange value. 

The thin “ideal” is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution.

The compulsion to imitate her is not something trivial that women choose freely to do to ourselves. It is something serious being done to us to safeguard political power. Seen in this light, it is inconceivable that women would not have to be compelled to grow thin at this point in our history.

Women must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are—less. We should identify it as Jews identify the death camps, as homosexuals identify AIDS: as a disgrace that is not our own, but that of an inhumane social order.

Patrick Book

Pretty good, for a girl.

JUST KIDDING. But seriously, this was a very intriguing read. Obviously there are large swaths that are dated after 20 years, and some of the statistics cited throughout seem, quite frankly, impossible, the entirety of this work is thought-provoking. Does it make sweeping generalizations about men that I don't necessarily agree with? Maybe, but I don't really matter in this equation so that's not going to bother me.

But I do struggle with what her central assumption/understanding that there is a total, intentional, institutional desire and a purposeful action to oppress women via unrealistic depictions/expectations of beauty. I don't think I'm smart enough to really buy into that, because while I know it to be true -- it is undeniable that the fundamental daily experiences of women are fraught in ways I cannot even imagine or begin to contemplate -- I can't understand in my head how that would happen on a practical and actual level. I understand the information she's presenting, and I largely agree with it, but I can't see the gears and cogs and whatnot.

Regardless, it is worth it just to get to the last page, which is a lengthy affirmation which I would love to see all women take to heart. And more than that, for men to take it to heart as well -- so that when we see women be shameless, greedy, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, wearing and touching and eating and drinking what they feel like, and so on...that we can understand and appreciate the enormity of that and support them in those goals.

How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women

The Beauty Myth

Elianne

Beth Seaton

This book is a little outdated but still so worth the read.

poprika

In the struggle for women's equality, there is one subject still shrouded in silence - women's compulsive pursuit of beauty. The myth of female beauty challenges every woman, every day of her life. Naomi Wolf exposes the tyranny of the beauty myth through the ages and its oppressive function today, in the home and at work, in literature and the media, in relationships between men and women, between women and women. With pertinent and intelligent examples, she confronts the beauty industry and its advertising and uncovers the reasons why women are consumed by this destructive obsession.

How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women

Joana Ribeiro

With the recent movement of Hollywood stars, this book even makes more sense. I have written a review on my blog but basically, I think that men and women alike should read this book. It is a bit exhaustive but full of content and gives us space to discuss where is the humanity going... Of course, this is historical but we should always want a better future and when we improve ourselves we help to build a better world.

The Book Worm

https://myworldasabookworm.blogspot.c...

Vintage Feminism- classic feminist texts in short formWITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOREvery day, women around the world are confronted with a dilemma - how to look. In a society embroiled in a cult of female beauty and youthfulness, pressure on women to conform physically is constant and all-pervading. In this shortened edition you will find the essence of Wolf?s groundbreaking book. It is a radical, gripping and frank expose of the tyranny of the beauty myth, its oppressive function and the destructive obsession it engenders.

Marina Riaza

this was amazing, it should be read in school.
a book that I will read from time to time.

Maria

после каждой такой книги хочется водрузить флаг куда-нибудь - мол, я взошел и герой. впечатления, меж тем, противоречивые. с одной стороны, "миф о красоте", безусловно, произведение для феминистской риторики программное. бодипозитив растет оттуда, осмысление сексуальности, объятие разумом масштабов насилия - страницы и страницы переворачиваешь с жуткими цифрами статистики об изнасилованиях, педофилии, увечьях, убийствах, смертности от анорексии, жертвах пластической хирургии. знать это всё надо, хоть и страшно. просто для того, чтобы видеть big picture и не заблуждаться относительно свершившейся победы феминизма на этой планете

с другой стороны, наоми вульф - женщина увлекающаяся и не чужда конспирологии. поэтому примерно после каждого важного набора фактов идет еще примерно раз в пять больше истерики - she goes on and on and on and on, как юродивый проповедник на площади, нередко добираясь до практически Тайного Патриархального Общества, которое захватило мир и имеет своей целью порабощение и/или уничтожение женщин, и которое, собственно, и придумало этот самый миф о красоте

не могу сказать, что я с ней согласна - по мне, это такое типичное религиозное мышление, мол, не может же всё так плохо быть просто так, без чьей-то хитрой задумки, наверняка это какая-то ацкая сотона замышляет. я же скорее склонна считать, что человечество туповато, и большую часть жизни проводит, не приходя в сознание, так что плачевное положение вещей - результат халатности, а не замысла

но для минут рефлексии чтение, в любом случае, полезное

Jessie Bertram

Contained a lot of YES moments, but it wasn’t quite there for me. While it was a very valuable read and would recommend to read, I would also recommend to not take everything too literal and think it over in your own context. Probably due to the writing style, it can come across quite conspiracy-y and sometimes a bit woolly. But still, excellent little book which will maybe make you think a little bit differently about how our views on beauty affect various structures of our society.

The bestselling classic that redefined our view od 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."

Sodium

a lot of the sentence structure just doesn't make sense and is so utterly complicated for no reason, but the part i hated the most is the way the author talks about how beauty is the only thing that keeps women from a lot of the rights and freedoms they finally achieved, completely disregarding every woman who wasnt a fully-abled cishet white woman. Yes, the way beauty is used against women is a very important conversation that needs to be had, but this isn't the way to do it.

Bad Girl Bex

Not putting myself through any more of this sociopath dross. Any harridan who chooses to view their life through this toxic lens should be avoided at all cost. Don't waste your time and money on such poisonous, sinister Marxist rhetoric. It isn't designed to truly empower or unite anyone. It's just one more cog in the vast "progressive" machine, which seeks to divide, bring about hatred and distrust of those in a different " identity" group. This particular piece of shit is designed to propagate misandry. To make women distrust men. 

Just as crazy Marxists elsewhere right now are using #BLM to cause racial tensions and further division in society. All with the backing of every huge virtue signalling corporation who claim to be in board with this shit. There is a war on for your mind and most of you don't realise just how sucked in you have been, to rhetoric designed ultimately to control you. Bow the knee all you want. Shine all the shoes in Chicago. But just remember, as these shitheels have already told us, liberals get the bullet too. Enjoy your role as ideological collateral damage while you're still able to. #FeminismIsCancer

Rachel

There are a lot of good points Naomi makes about the pressure women face when it comes to being a "beauty" and how no matter how we dress or what we do, we can't win. My issue with this book is that it doesn't explore in depth the rise of the beauty myth in advertising and because of that it reads like a conspiracy theory to keep women down, rather than try to look at other factors that played a role. Still an interesting read, especially from a historical standpoint because you can see how we have progressed and where we are still experiencing the same problems from when this book was written in the early 90s.

The beauty myth how images of beauty are used against women

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