CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Naomi Wolf
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction by Naomi Wolf
The Beauty Myth
Work
Culture
Sex
Hunger
Violence
Beyond the Beauty Myth
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century
Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire
Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood
The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from my Father on How to Live, Love and See
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries
Vagina: A New Biography
FOR MY PARENTS
DEOBORAH AND LEONARD WOLF
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Copyright © Naomi Wolf 1990
Introduction copyright © Naomi Wolf 2015
Naomi Wolf has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
The Beauty Myth was first published in Great Britain in 1990 by Chatto & Windus
This abridged edition first published in 2015 by Vintage
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ISBN 9781784870416
When I wrote The Beauty Myth in 1991, I felt I was writing, to some extent, into a vacuum. Many media outlets had proclaimed that feminism – the feminism of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, of NOW, was dead. Middle-class Western women, anyway, were focused on getting into the workplace, not on social revolution; the issues of working-class and poor women were far from central. News outlets repeated continually that young women rejected feminism and that ‘the battles had all been won’, as the cliché went.
I knew from looking at my own young peers – I was twenty-six when the book was written – that indeed the battles had not been won – but that many of them had become internalised. Though my peers no longer cared much about maintaining the perfect household – the ideal of femininity against which our mother’s generation had rebelled – they were obsessed with another kind of perfection: physical perfection, as measured against fashion models and film stars. The young women around me, who should have been the brightest, most ambitious and most effective young women ever to inhabit the planet – as they inherited the gains and analysis of feminism – were often trapped in a desperate cycle of starving themselves compulsively, or compulsively exercising, or binging and purging. Apart from the physical toll that this took, I saw the toll that these fixations took upon their ability to feel free inside their own minds – to explore themselves and their world – to fight their own battles. I saw that the epidemic of eating disorders on my own college campus as an undergraduate, and on college campuses throughout the world, and throughout the West, indeed, was a political sedative.
Since I had been fortunate enough to have studied feminist history, I realised that in every generation in which there was a great push forward by women, some ideal arose to colonise their energies and thus make sure that they did not get too far. And then, I saw, in every generation that had seen such an awakening, the next generation was told to go home – it was ‘post-feminism’ time – the battles had all been won. It seemed clear to me that that dynamic was what was involved with the ever-more-unattainable, ever-thinner, ever-more-surgically-enhanced quality of the images of perfection that bombarded women’s sensibilities in every direction – now that women had the chance of being really free.
The initial edition of The Beauty Myth benefited from a lot of good fortune. It was an argument that hit at just the moment in which a generation of young women did indeed want to embrace a new version of feminism – did indeed want to analyse the unique conditions around them and take their own oppression seriously – and did indeed want to reinvigorate the discourse of feminism to take action once again, collectively as well as individually. The book was a bestseller in fourteen countries, but even more important, it was part of a new awakening of discussion and debate about many feminist topics in many new feminist voices – an awakening that writer Rebecca Walker and I, working independently, both happened to identify with a freshly coined term, The Third Wave.
Since the 1990s, feminism in the West has remained fresh, varied and vigorous; there has been a fourth wave, and I would say we are admiring the rise of a fifth. The new feminisms differ in some ways very much from the iconic feminism of the 1960s and ’70s – they are more pluralistic, more tolerant, more inclusive of men, more aware of LGBTQ issues, more sophisticated about the intersection of race, class and gender, more alert to the feminist issues of the developing world. All this is a big set of advantages, and I am really proud for The Beauty Myth, which continues to be read, to have had a small part in this reawakening of discussion and action. But though action and awareness overall is much better for women, in some ways the ‘beauty-myth’ issues raised in this book have stayed the same or become worse; in other ways some have got better.
As I write today, statistics for anorexia and bulimia are exactly what they were in 1991. On some campuses 30 per cent of sorority women suffer from bulimia, making it one of the few socially transmitted mental health problems. Exercise fixations and dysmorphia – a condition in which you don’t see your body in an undistorted way – are, if anything, more mainstream and widespread. The fear of ageing, among some groups of women, remains as strong as ever – new surgical technologies and lowered prices have made these interventions far more common. And eyelid-crease surgeries, nose-‘refining’ surgeries, dangerous skin-lightening creams, and so on – in response to globalised marketing campaigns with Western ideals – are rife in the developing world. Finally the ubiquity of pornography, which did not exist in a digitised, livestreaming format in 1991, ensures that these ideals go ‘deeper’ than they did in that era – as young women and young men too often feel that physical perfection is the gateway to acceptable sexuality.
On the other hand, what has become much better is the generalised awareness among women – and men – that these media ideals are both fake – indeed more fake than when I wrote this book in 1991, since then we had retouching; whereas today beauty images are simply digitally invented – and destructive. It is much more common for Girl Guides and Girl Scouts and women’s magazines to discuss the artificiality and negative psychological impact of these ideas, and it is more common for women themselves to try to set up ways of reclaiming their own bodies and beauty in ways that they themselves define – from such songs as ‘I am Beautiful’ to such ad campaigns as the Dove campaign for Real Beauty. Editors of women’s magazines, too, try to showcase more inclusive images – though the pressures on them from advertisers have remained intense. And social media – though some say it heightens pressures on young women to feel physically self-conscious – also breaks down the barrier between the consumer of media and the producer, and opens up many more models of stylishness, coolness and glamour.
On balance, I think we have come a long way. It is a great thing for young women and men today to grow up taking for granted that they are entitled to analyse and criticise the mass media ideals that are presented to them, and to define beauty, glamour and style for themselves. And it is a fantastic gift to both genders that they get to define a feminism of their own in which to do so. In that spirit, I hope you enjoy – and then make your own unique, creative and irreplaceable use of – this abridged new version of The Beauty Myth.
Naomi Wolf, 2015
At last, after a long silence, women took to the streets. In the two decades of radical action that followed the rebirth of feminism in the early 1970s, Western women gained legal and reproductive rights, pursued higher education, entered the trades and the professions, and overturned ancient and revered beliefs about their social role. A generation on, do women feel free?
The affluent, educated, liberated women of the First World, who can enjoy freedoms unavailable to any women ever before, do not feel as free as they want to. 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. But in spite of shame, guilt, and denial, more and more women are wondering if it isn’t that they are entirely neurotic and alone but rather that something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us. Many women sense that women’s collective progress has stalled; compared with the heady momentum of earlier days, there is a dispiriting climate of confusion, division, cynicism, and above all, exhaustion. After years of much struggle and little recognition, many older women feel burned out; after years of taking its light for granted, many younger women show little interest in touching new fire to the torch.
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. More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret ‘underlife’ poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.
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. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution. As women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it waned to carry on its work of social control.
The contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable: It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.
This counterforce is operating to checkmate the inheritance of feminism on every level in the lives of Western women. Feminism gave us laws against job discrimination based on gender; immediately case law evolved in Britain and the United States that institutionalized job discrimination based on women’s appearances. Patriarchal religion declined; new religious dogma, using some of the mind-altering techniques of older cults and sects, arose around age and weight to functionally supplant traditional ritual. Feminists, inspired by Friedan, broke the stranglehold on the women’s popular press of advertisers for household products, who were promoting the feminine mystique; at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women’s intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood. The sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality; ‘beauty pornography’ – which for the first time in women’s history artificially links a commodified ‘beauty’ directly and explicitly to sexuality – invaded the mainstream to undermine women’s new and vulnerable sense of sexual self-worth. Reproductive rights gave Western women control over our own bodies; the weight of fashion models plummeted to 23 percent below that of ordinary women, eating disorders rose exponentially, and a mass neurosis was promoted that used food and weight to strip women of that sense of control. Women insisted on politicizing health; new technologies of invasive, potentially deadly ‘cosmetic’ surgeries developed apace to re-exert old forms of medical control of women.
Every generation since about 1830 has had to fight its version of the beauty myth. ‘It is very little to me,’ said the suffragist Lucy Stone in 1855, ‘to have the right to vote, to own property, etcetera, if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.’ Eighty years later, after women had won the vote, and the first wave of the organized women’s movement had subsided, Virginia Woolf wrote that it would still be decades before women could tell the truth about their bodies. In 1962, Betty Friedan quoted a young woman trapped in the Feminine Mystique: ‘Lately, I look in the mirror, and I’m so afraid I’m going to look like my mother.’ Eight years after that, heralding the cataclysmic second wave of feminism, Germaine Greer described ‘the Stereotype’: ‘To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself … she is a doll … I’m sick of the masquerade.’ In spite of the great revolution of the second wave, we are not exempt. Now we can look out over ruined barricades: A revolution has come upon us and changed everything in its path, enough time has passed since then for babies to have grown into women, but there still remains a final right not fully claimed.
The beauty myth tells a story: The quality called ‘beauty’ objectively and universally exists. 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.
None of this is true. ‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.
‘Beauty’ is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic Ideal Woman; the Maori admire a fat vulva, and the Padung, droopy breasts. Nor is ‘beauty’ a function of evolution: Its ideals change at a pace far more rapid than that of the evolution of species, and Charles Darwin was himself unconvinced by his own explanation that ‘beauty’ resulted from a ‘sexual selection’ that deviated from the rule of natural selection; for women to compete with women through ‘beauty’ is a reversal of the way in which natural selection affects all other mammals. Anthropology has overturned the notion that females must be ‘beautiful’ to be selected to mate: Evelyn Reed, Elaine Morgan, and others have dismissed sociobiological assertions of innate male polygamy and female monogamy. Female higher primates are the sexual initiators; not only do they seek out and enjoy sex with many partners, but ‘every nonpregnant female takes her turn at being the most desirable of all her troop. And that cycle keeps turning as long as she lives.’ The inflamed pink sexual organs of primates are often cited by male sociobiologists as analogous to human arrangements relating to female ‘beauty,’ when in fact that is a universal, nonhierarchical female primate characteristic.
Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing of the older rich men with young, ‘beautiful’ women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E.