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Title: The Beauty Myth : How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf ISBN: 0-06-051218-0 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 24 September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.59 (49 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: If you're not angry, you're not awake
Comment: The day before I read this book, I was leafing through a fashion/beauty magazine which included a breakdown of what the "average woman" spends on beauty products and treatments each year. Their featured "average woman" spent around $12,000 a year on cosmetics, hair cuts, face cream, facials, and other beauty "essentials." How lucky for their average woman that she's not earning minimum wage!
The magazine, seeming to realize how excessive that figure was, gave women tips on what products they could cut back on and only buy the $7 version of because the $25 version is no better. So why do women still spend money on $25 wrinkle treatments? Perhaps because magazines like this spend a couple of pages every month hard selling them?
What Naomi Wolf's book really made me realize was not so much how much our culture sells women pointless products and pressures them into striving for a certain narrow picture of beauty, but the extent to which it has harmed women in so many areas - not just with obvious things like eating disorders, but with the degree of violence which women become willing to perpetrate against themselves, as well as the ecomonic impact on women. Men may argue that they too have things they are "pressured" to take part in or judged by, but these examples are disingenous, things that large numbers of men do not take part in, and not something on which their ability to even hold a job is affected by. Men are not fired as they get older, *purely because of their looks.*
Men who feel attacked by the fact that Wolf regards this control of women as part of the patriarchal structure and plan evidently miss the point that patriarchy does not equal all men. Wolf is not blaming men, she is blaming patriarchy - and there is a big difference. It is about a consciousness, a structure, a manner of relating and behaving to the world, whether the people working in the beauty companies or the media are male or female (though it is a truth that the vast majority of the financial/corporate and political power in the Western world is controlled by men). Men can be and are oppressed by patriarchy, and other books have addressed this topic, but they don't happen to be oppressed in this particular way so it is not something relevant that Wolf's book needed to address.
Rating: 4
Summary: Fascinating and disturbing
Comment: I have read many books on feminism over the past few years, and have read books that dispute some of the statistics in this book. Nonetheless, it is a good read, because it makes you aware of things that are going on in the lives of young women.
Whatever the numbers, the fact remains that young women are slowly killing and disfiguring themselves in the name of that ever-unattainable, ever-subjective idea, "beauty." Is it really significant is five women a year die of bulimia or anorexia or if it's closer to five hundred? The fact remains that something is seriously wrong with these girls to make them think that they have no other way of being socially accepted. Does it matter how much the cosmetic surgery industry really grosses annually? After all, ten years or so after this book is written, we have shows on prime-time television like "Extreme Makeover," in which someone contacts the show and tells them how horrible they feel about themselves because of a physical flaw--a nose that is too big, eyes that are too wide-spaced--and the show promptly signs them up to be hacked away at, made into a modern-day Galatea, for the viewing pleasure of America. If you have watched this show, you also know exactly what Wolf is trying to convey in her chapter on Violence. She states that women are always told that they can look better in some way...and sure enough, once they get into the doctor's office, suddenly the nose is not the only problem anymore. Liposuction, [body part] job...sign me up. In watching another special on cosmetic surgery on MTV not long ago, two women were portrayed whose highest goal was to be--of all things for young women today to desire--[Magazine] bunnies. They went in for things like a nose job and a [body part]job, and suddenly you saw the doctor pointing out all the other things "wrong" with them. The two relatively thin (and when I say "relatively," I mean they were probably underweight, but not as skinny as anorexic-looking models) girls were told that they should do something about invisible "saddlebags" and also maybe should consider doing something about the excess fat on their thighs--again, barely visible to the naked eye.
Wolf claims all this is political--a move to keep women down. And I'm not sure if I completely buy into the fact that it is all a political move to do just that, but I certainly realize that there is a definite cause for concern. If even one girl binges and purges, it's too many...and the fact remains that models are, in fact, horribly underweight, and then they have their photos retouched and airbrushed to make them look even skinnier. Women cannot compete with that which does not exist.
This book is definitely a good buy--it's easy reading and thought-provoking. I would recommend it to anyone interested in women's studies...and I would also recommend it to any woman, especially one who plans on having children, because it is so important to break this cycle of unattainable expectations.
Rating: 3
Summary: The gender agenda
Comment: Naomi Wolf has written a winner for the women's political movement with the 'Beauty Myth'. However, she has done it with flawed logic and misuse of facts to further the female political agenda. The book offers many valid and potent messages, however had the inconsistencies been better concealed the impact would have been more powerful. Lacking a logical thread and qualification, it is filled with contradictions, and clearly unsubstantiated conclusions. The premise of the book, that women are oppressed by external beauty, is driven systematically and maliciously by a male dominated society. This is done to prevent women from achieving full liberation and taking their rightful place in society, truly a cosmetic shackle. In past generations, pregnancy and childbirth were not easily avoidable, creating 'prisoners of the womb'. Advances in contraception now offer greater freedom to women while civic liberty, access to workplace opportunities, and equal social standing have all been hard fought battles. With liberation close at hand, males scrambled to remain dominant. For this they fabricated the 'beauty myth'. Women found themselves pursuing material outer beauty, a clearly trivial, disempowering exercise. Rejecting any link to bio-logic Wolf posits that slimmers ailments, cosmetic surgery, violence and the like, were designed by men to retain control. This approach is simplistic, avoids gender neutral social conformity, and ironically, denies women responsibility over their own destiny.
Many valid observations are made on diet and hunger, and their enslavement of female bodies and minds. Commercial hunger sells cosmetic manipulation to the desire for slim and young beauty. Yet no connection is made to the enslavement of all human society, male and female. While the outcomes differ, the conformance mechanisms are principally the same for both genders. Wolf highlights social aspects that affect women without providing a balanced view of those affecting men. The claim our society condones female mutilation, but not male, ignores obvious examples in the extreme endeavours of sport, war and adventure that men are driven to pursue. Should we put this down to how women manipulate male behaviour and therefore a female responsibility?
The predominantly western beauty myth around which this book is based, is helped in part, by mothers teaching their daughters behaviour that will result in diet and image related problems from adolescence. Wolf discounts any female responsibility for this, instead blaming media and institutions who manipulate the female psyche. These faceless organisations of the beauty industry are staffed with high numbers of women, none of them responsible. Men carry the burden of deliberately creating and promulgating the exploitation of women through the beauty industry. Women are puppets, from the hungry models to the countless millions that buy the percieved trivia of magazines and beauty aids, removing wrinkles, fat, hair, clothing etc, while men do 'real' things like run businesses, climb mountains and race Formula 1 motor cars.
Wolf does concede that some men do not support this tyranny - she almost allows herself to see some of the real issues her book fails to address - but the pull of preconceived ideas proves too strong and the needle slips back in the groove. She discounts any innate biological basis for beauty in human mating behaviour. The issue of ageing women she puts down to male fear of the power in older women, not entertaining the idea that younger women offer better breeding prospects than old. Like any good politician Wolf is not distracted by facts.
Ironically, in building her case that men are totally responsible for the oppression of women, she denies women control over their own lives. She asks that women be 'allowed' to take their rightful place in the running the world as a better place for all, yet her book takes pains to show how little responsibility they have taken for their lives in the past. Why then, are things going to change, is responsibility parcelled out like food in a famine? You either control things, or you don't. Having someone allow you to control is no control at all. Our impact on society is measured by our contribution, or lack of.
Wolf has unwittingly disempowered her own gender, possibly doing more harm than good to the female cause, by denying them any responsibility in todays world.
My criticism of this book, to this point, has been as one-eyed as the book itself. There is no question men and women share equal responsibility for our world. We both have strengths and weaknesses, being different sides of the same coin. Until cloning becomes a practical reality for human reproduction - and it will - men and women are locked into the contradictions of conflict and cooperation that color many intimate relationships. Power struggles are an unavoidable consequence.
There is also no question that the victims of eating disorders like anorexia, cosmetics and hair removal show enslavement of individual women to practices, that by relative human standards, are harmful or sometimes fatal, and I do not question their suffering. What is not offered is a balanced social context of men and women. Men are victim to the same processs, though the specific outcomes differ. A parallel book could be written about the enslavement of males to their bizarre habit of fighting in national and personal wars, dying in reckless adventure and sporting events, crashing fast cars, the list is endless. All this, in an attempt to gain status and control among ourselves, in order to improve our chances with women. Why should we hold men responsible for this behaviour? We all know it was Helen's face that launched a thousand ships in the Trojan War, and not the men sitting inside, clutching swords.
As a gender political book, the Beauty Myth is powerful and worth reading. However, for those readers looking for objectivity, not political rhetoric, this book will disappoint.
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Title: The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls by Joan Jacobs Brumberg ISBN: 0679735291 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi ISBN: 0385425074 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: October, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Anna Quindlen ISBN: 0393322572 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood by Naomi Wolf ISBN: 0449907643 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty by Nancy Etcoff ISBN: 0385479425 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 05 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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