The Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf is not a figure without controversy, particularly when it comes to her tendency to play fast and loose with figures and statistics in order to support her arguments. This was her first major work, originally published in 1990, and is generally considered a feminist classic. It posits that as women made increasing gains of economic and political power through the early 20th century, the existing power structure began to increasingly seek to re-assert control over them through narrowly defined and strictly enforced beauty standards. No matter what else we may seek to and actually accomplish, it has become widely understood that being attractive is a fundamental requirement for those accomplishments to have any real meaning. She reviews the ways that beauty standards are enforced in the workplace, the way skincare is marketed, the way pornography has become increasingly accessible and demonstrative of violence against women, and the spread of disordered eating. There's some interesting stuff in here that rings true as a person who has lived as a woman in the world, spent too much money on moisturizers, lived through a high school bout of anorexia, and wrestled with shame over my post-baby body. But the errors in her numerical citations, particularly around eating disorders, diminish her credibility. As does the extremely cringey portion in which she likens social pressure to be thin with literal starvation in concentration camps, her blinders about race and class, and some of the more spurious arguments she makes that seem like they might be as much to fill out a word count as anything else. There's just not enough here, or if there is it's not well-developed enough, for an entire book. This should have been a long-form essay (though I did find it more interesting than not).