page_title: Naomi Wolf
section_title: The Beauty Myth (1991)
hierarchical_section_title: Naomi Wolf / Works / The Beauty Myth (1991)
caption_attribution_description: English: Author Naomi Wolf speaking at an event hosted by the NYC chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. The talk was held at the Brooklyn Law School.
context_page_description: Naomi R. Wolf is an American liberal progressive feminist author, journalist, and former political advisor to Al Gore and Bill Clinton.
  Via Wolf's first book The Beauty Myth, she became a leading spokeswoman of what has been described as the third wave of the feminist movement. Such leading feminists as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised the work; others, including Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers, criticized it. Her later books include the bestseller The End of America in 2007 and Vagina: A New Biography. Critics have challenged the quality and accuracy of the scholarship in her books, including Outrages. In this case, her serious misreading of court records led to its publication in the U.S. being cancelled.
  Her career in journalism began in 1995 and has included topics such as abortion, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Edward Snowden and ISIS. She has written for media outlets such as The Nation, The New Republic, The Guardian and The Huffington Post.
context_section_description: In 1991, Wolf gained international attention as a spokeswoman of third-wave feminism from the publication of her first book The Beauty Myth, an international bestseller. It was named "one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century" by The New York Times. She argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the objective of maintaining women's subjugation.
  Wolf posits the idea of an "iron-maiden", an intrinsically unattainable standard that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for their failure to achieve and conform to it. Wolf criticized the fashion and beauty industries as exploitative of women, but added that the beauty myth extended into all areas of human functioning. Wolf writes that women should have "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically". Wolf argues that women were under assault by the "beauty myth" in five areas: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Ultimately, Wolf argues for a relaxation of normative standards of beauty. In her introduction, Wolf positioned her argument against the concerns of second-wave feminists and offered the following analysis:
  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 ... [D]uring the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty ... [P]ornography 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.
caption: Naomi Wolf speaking at Brooklyn Law School, January 29, 2009
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