"The Beauty Myth" Naomi Wolf - 1991

The Beauty Myth is the cultural ideology that women strive to be beautiful as a way to be pacified and controlled. A response to women gaining some control and power in the workplace is to create an image of beauty where the "gaunt, youthful supermodel supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful womanhood" using food and weight to strip women of their sense of control (p.11)

"The quality called "beauty" objectively and universally exisits. Women must want to embody it and men must want to posses women who embody it." (p.12) The beauty myth is about "men's institutions and institutional power." (p.13) Using beauty to make women competitive and pit them against each other to win a man. After the women's movement "inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work took over from inexhaustible but ephemeral housework." (p.16) "When the restless, isolated, bored, and insecure housewife [ideal consumer] fled the Feminine Mystique for the workplace, advertisers faced the loss of their primary consumer...Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that they will buy more things if they are kept in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring "beauties...The beauty myth, in its modern form, arose to take the place of the Feminine Mystique, to save magazine's and advertisers of the economic fallout of the women's revolution." (p.66)

She then talks about the role of advertisers and editors in women's magazines; magazines that are meant to offer women power yet promote masochism. Women internalize the beauty myth as do the magazines that must sell the products that they have convinced women that they need.

Most articles this week are not interested in difference - like much of first wave feminism. All articles this week assume that femininity ties women to their bodies. The body becomes the site of our productivity and women learn to work on the body.