Challenging ‘The Beauty Myth’

In her book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argues that women, despite having more ‘money, more ‘power’, more ‘scope’ and more ‘legal recognition’ than ever before, feel ‘physically’ worse off than their ‘unliberated’ predecessors. According to Wolf, the cause of this dissatisfaction is ‘the beauty myth’ — which is basically the pressure to be beautiful.

There is no doubting that this pressure exists, and that it is having a negative effect on women, but Wolf’s argument becomes unconvincing when she claims that the myth is deliberately designed to undermine the ‘inheritance of feminism’:

There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women […] As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women’s advancement

The ‘beauty myth’ may undermine women’s advancement, but that is not the industry’s intention. The industry’s intention is profit. It is, otherwise, completely indifferent to social struggles.

With her cabal-like ‘power structure’, Wolf turns the ‘beauty myth’ into a conspiracy theory. This becomes so apparent in the first few pages that Wolf says defensively…