The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women
Naomi Wolf
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0060512180
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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."
maintain that rate of growth, higher than that of any other “medical specialty.” Women’s pain threshold has to be raised, and a new sense of vulnerability imbedded in us, if the industry is to reap the full profit of their new technology acting on old guilt. The surgeons’ market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women’s faces or bodies that social change won’t cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred. “The
Addicts “go from doctor to doctor, seeking multiple operations. . . . Their self-scrutiny becomes microscopic. They start complaining about bumps the average person doesn’t see.” And the surgeons operate: one in particular has cut up one woman at least half a dozen times, “and expects to keep up the remodelling work. ‘I guess it’s all right,’ he says, ‘as long as her husband doesn’t complain.’” Safeguards Medical coercion in service of a vital lie is less regulated than legitimate
Journalist Jeremy Weir in Self magazine puts the number at over a million, and the profits at between $168 million and $374 million. (The operation costs from $1,800 to $4,000.) The breast, he writes, is the part surgeons are cutting into most: 159,300 breast operations in a year, compared with 67,000 face-lifts. The surgery leads to a hardening of scar tissue around the implants in up to seven cases in ten, when the breasts become rock-hard and must be reopened and the implants removed, or the
nineteenth century, the Church hierarchy remained “strictly male.” The feminization of religion intensified side by side with the secularization of the male world. “Whatever expansion the Protestant religious establishment experienced in post–Civil War America, it was an expansion fueled by women rather than by men,” Joan Jacobs Brumberg agrees. Women have not been admitted as ministers and rabbis until this generation. Until recently, their training has been to accept without question male
will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand the airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by “beauty”—a box continually shrinking—he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him. CHRISTIAN LACROIX GIVES WOMEN BACK THEIR FEMININITY, reads the fashion headline. “Femininity” is code for femaleness plus whatever a