The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf
Published in 1991, Naomi Wolf explores how the barrage of media images of women are used to keep women in constant conflict with their bodies. The “ideal” that is presented to women through advertisements is used to make women feel inadequate; thus, women become compelled to buy the products that are being advertised in order to achieve the “ideal.” Wolf defines this western ideal of womanhood as “the beauty myth.” This myth essentially keeps women out of power. In fact, women are expected to spend their time and money on achieving this beauty, a beauty that women feel discriminated against if they don’t possess it.
Wolf divides her book into sections titled Work, Culture, Religion, Sex, Hunger, and Violence. In each section she discusses how the beauty myth affects women in terms of each of these topics. One of the most interesting arguments that Wolf makes is in her section on Sex. In this section Wolf argues that in Western society’s definition beauty and sexual identity are inextricably linked. Women can’t feel sexually attractive or express their sexuality fully if they don’t feel beautiful. In order to combat this myth and to regain our bodies, women need to realize what the media is doing to our self image.
Wolf asks, “How to begin? Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes. And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it: In a sensual politics, female is beautiful.”
