Wolf, therefore, believes that masochistic dieting symbolically reflects women’s inferior role in the late 20th-century West.
According to traditions across different cultures, the most valued community members received the most food. Similarly, she traces the lucrative diet-and-exercise industry, in which women are encouraged to be perpetually hungry and fixate on food, back to traditional ideas about food and social hierarchy. These chapters are “Work,” “Culture,” “Religion,” “Sex,” “Hunger,” “Violence,” and “Beyond the Beauty Myth.” Wolf analyzes the beauty myth within these specific contexts, as well as the way these contexts interplay and overlap to enforce patriarchal beauty standards for women.Įven though the beauty myth is primarily linked to modern consumerism, the author links it to patriarchal ideas from earlier historic periods such as the biblical creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. The following seven chapters analyze the way the beauty myth has spread in the West in the context of consumerism and mass culture, especially after the Industrial Revolution. The link between the beauty myth and “a long hard struggle for identity” is the main theme in this text (285). Wolf defines the beauty myth as a commodified, censored, and unreachable physical ideal to which women must adhere. The first chapter, “The Beauty Myth,” defines the book’s subject matter and some of its key themes ranging from religion to elective cosmetic surgery. 'A smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom.This study guide refers to the 2009 HarperCollins eBook edition.Ĭontent Warning: This book references disordered eating and domestic violence.
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. In this iconic, gripping and frank expose, 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. In a society embroiled in a cult of female beauty and youthfulness, pressure on women to conform physically is constant and all-pervading. Įvery day, women around the world are confronted with a dilemma - how to look. The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity.
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