The Beauty Myth

I came across the book The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf and decided it may be good to read as research for this project. The book was written in 1991 so it talks about the early signs of this 'beauty obsessed' world and how it came about, it talks about how women are affected by the societies pressure to be beautiful and it is interesting to see what has changed and what has stayed the same between now and then.

The book uses a definition of the 'beauty myth' which i thought was interesting:

Definition of the beauty myth:

Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it. This embodiment is an imperative for women and not for men, which situation is necessary and natural because it is biological, sexual, and evolutionary: Strong men battle for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more reproductively successful. Women’s beauty must correlate to their fertility, and since this system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and changeless.

In simpler terms what they are trying to say is that woman want to be beautiful and men want to possess women who are beautiful. It is crucial for women but not for men. Strong men battle for beautiful women and beautiful women are generally more successful. Women's beauty must relate to their fertility and since the system is based on sexual selection, it is inevitable and changeless.

What i take from this is that in the early 1900's men played a huge part in the obsession of beauty. The reason women wanted to be beautiful is so that men would take interest in them. This is still a factor today although i feel that society have taken over mens role and become more dominant in the pressures towards women. 

At the start of the book Wolf talks about the issues that women worry about that shouldn't really matter but have become issues due to the pressures on them from society and men. 

she says 'And they can no longer restrict to the subconscious their sense that this lack of freedom has something to do with with apparently frivolous issues, things that really should not matter. Many are ashamed to admit that such trivial concerns—to do with physical appearance, bodies, faces, hair, clothes matter so much.'

Due to these pressures from the media, society and men the rate in eating disorders started to rise as women became more conscious of their bodies and what they were eating. Although at the same time women were receiving more power due to jobs and the ability to vote, they were getting stronger in one sense but weaker in another. 

'During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty. During the past five years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.

It is no accident that so many potentially powerful women feel this way. We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth'

Wolf then goes on to talk about youth and how youth and virginity (until recently) were seen as beautiful. Women are seen to grow wiser with age and this is intimidating to men therefore older women were seen as 'un-beautiful'. The beauty myth has also made women fearful of each other. Young women fear Older women due to becoming 'less beautiful' although wiser and older women fear younger women as they are a threat to them as they have youth and are seen as beautiful. The beauty myth effects women for their whole life span, there is no way out. 

'Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have been “beautiful” in women since they stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is “un- beautiful” since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span.'

This has all come about in the past 100 years due to the rise in technology and the images we are exposed to, before the camera there were paintings but before that all women had to go off were each other and to them everybody was beautiful. Now with such a huge emphasis on women in the media it has turned women against each other and to pick out insecurities in each other. 

'Before the development of technologies of mass production—daguerrotypes, photographs, etc.—an ordinary woman was exposed to few such images outside the Church.'

'For the first time new technologies could reproduce—in fashion plates, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and rotogravures—images of how women should look. In the 1840s the first nude photographs of prostitutes were taken; advertisements using images of “beautiful” women first appeared in mid-century'

Everything is continuing to grow and affecting more women and for a fact affecting younger women. Teenage girls are very vulnerable and now from such a young age are exposed to such powerful and harsh critiques of how they should be, look, dress etc. 

'And the unconscious hallucination grows ever more influential and pervasive because of what is now conscious market manipulation: powerful industries—the $33-billion-a-year diet industry, the $20-billion cosmetics industry, the $300-million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7-billion pornography industry—have arisen from the capital made out of unconscious anxieties, and are in turn able, through their influence on mass culture, to use, stimulate, and reinforce the hallucination in a rising economic spiral.'

'Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced “beautiful” images?'

'An ideology that makes women feel “worth less” was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more'

It is clear where all of this came from. Feminism and women fighting for their power, the government have given them that power but have now decided to degrade them in a different way. Through making themselves feel worthless and not good enough. It has definitely worsened since the beauty myth was written but i hope that now we are all aware of the effects it is having on women and young girls we will all be able to help stop it.