The Beauty Myth

The Beauty Myth Plot Summary

Introduction

The beauty myth represents one of the most powerful and pervasive systems of social control operating in modern society. As women have gained unprecedented legal, educational, and professional opportunities, beauty standards have paradoxically become more demanding, expensive, and physically harmful. This is no coincidence but rather a calculated response to women's advancement - a political weapon designed to undermine female progress by keeping women psychologically and physically exhausted. What makes the beauty myth particularly insidious is how it has been internalized by women themselves, operating not merely as external pressure but as an internal police force that generates self-hatred and constant preoccupation with physical appearance. By examining the economic, sexual, religious, and medical dimensions of beauty standards, we can understand how this system functions to maintain gender inequality while extracting women's financial resources and political energy. The beauty myth's genius lies in its ability to make women complicit in their own subjugation while believing they are exercising free choice in pursuit of self-improvement.

Chapter 1: Beauty as a Political Weapon Against Female Advancement

The beauty myth operates as a sophisticated political weapon against women's progress, evolving in direct response to feminist advances. As women have broken through various barriers to equality - gaining voting rights, educational opportunities, workplace access, and reproductive freedom - beauty standards have intensified to counteract these gains. This correlation is not coincidental but calculated, representing what Wolf identifies as a "violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement." The timing of this backlash reveals its political nature. During the 1920s, when women won voting rights in many Western countries, the ideal female body suddenly shifted from curvaceous to boyishly thin. Following women's unprecedented workforce participation during World War II, the 1950s beauty ideal emphasized exaggerated femininity and domestic containment. Most dramatically, the feminist victories of the 1970s were followed by the most extreme beauty standards in history during the 1980s and 1990s, with fashion models becoming 23% thinner than average women (compared to just 8% thinner in previous decades). The beauty myth functions by creating a vertical hierarchy that assigns value to women according to culturally imposed physical standards. This hierarchy serves as an expression of power relations, forcing women to compete unnaturally for resources that men have appropriated for themselves. By promoting competition between women based on appearance, the beauty myth undermines female solidarity and collective action. Women are encouraged to view other women as rivals rather than allies, further weakening potential resistance to the system. What makes the beauty myth particularly effective as a political weapon is how it has been internalized by women themselves. It operates not merely through external coercion but by teaching women to police their own bodies and appearance. This internalization creates what Wolf calls "a dark underside of self-hatred, physical obsession, terror of aging, and dread of lost control." The result is that women expend tremendous psychological and physical energy on appearance that might otherwise be directed toward education, career advancement, or political activism. The beauty myth also functions by transforming political issues into personal problems. When women experience discrimination or devaluation based on appearance, they are encouraged to view this as an individual failing rather than systematic oppression. The solution offered is not collective action to change discriminatory systems but individual consumption to fix supposed personal flaws. This redirection of women's energy from political resistance to personal transformation serves to maintain existing power structures while creating profitable markets for beauty products and services.

Chapter 2: The Economic Control System Behind Beauty Requirements

The beauty myth functions as a crucial economic control mechanism that emerged in response to women's increasing financial independence. As women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during the 1970s and 1980s, they threatened to become a destabilizing economic force. The beauty myth evolved to neutralize this threat by creating what Wolf calls the "Professional Beauty Qualification" (PBQ) - an unwritten but powerful requirement that women must meet certain appearance standards to succeed professionally. This beauty qualification serves multiple economic functions. First, it reinforces the gender wage gap by requiring women to spend significant portions of their income on appearance maintenance. Urban professional women often devote up to a third of their earnings to beauty upkeep - creating what amounts to a self-imposed tax that effectively reduces women's economic power. Even when women earn equal salaries to men, this beauty tax ensures they take home substantially less. The beauty economy thus functions as a system of "do-it-yourself income discrimination" that maintains economic inequality even as formal barriers fall. The beauty myth also creates massive industries that profit from women's insecurities. The diet industry alone generates $33 billion annually, while the cosmetics industry accounts for $20 billion, cosmetic surgery $300 million, and pornography $7 billion. These commercial interests actively promote and profit from women's anxieties about their appearance, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of insecurity and consumption. The economic incentives to maintain the beauty myth are therefore enormous, with powerful corporate interests invested in its continuation. Perhaps most perniciously, the beauty qualification inverts the male career trajectory. While men gain power, status, and perceived attractiveness as they age, women are taught that they lose value with each passing year. This creates a situation where women's careers are artificially limited by age-based appearance discrimination. Despite decades of feminist progress in education and early career advancement, only 1-2% of upper management positions are held by women. The glass ceiling remains firmly in place, reinforced by beauty standards that punish the very signs of age that in men are associated with increased authority and wisdom. The beauty myth also exhausts women, limiting their capacity for resistance or organizing. Surveys consistently show that working women cite tiredness as their main problem, with 70% of senior women executives naming exhaustion as their primary challenge. This exhaustion serves to neutralize women's collective advancement - professional women have just enough energy to do their jobs well, but too little for social activism or independent thinking that might question the structure itself. The beauty myth thus functions as what Wolf calls "a third shift" - an additional burden of labor that women must perform after their paid work and domestic responsibilities.

Chapter 3: Media and Advertising's Role in Perpetuating Beauty Ideology

Media plays a central role in transmitting and reinforcing the beauty myth, with women's magazines serving as both primary conduits for beauty ideology and, paradoxically, rare spaces dedicated to women's concerns. This creates a complex relationship where women's magazines simultaneously advance feminist ideas while undermining them through beauty content that promotes insecurity and consumption. The evolution of women's magazines has closely tracked women's changing social roles, adapting their content to maintain relevance and advertising revenue as women moved from domestic to professional spheres. When the second wave of feminism emerged in the 1970s, women's magazines faced an existential crisis. As middle-class women abandoned their role as consuming housewives and entered the workforce, their engagement with issues of the outer world threatened their interest in the separate feminine reality portrayed in magazines. Between 1965 and 1981, British women's magazine sales fell sharply from 555.3 million to 407.4 million copies annually. The industry responded with a brilliant strategic pivot - since traditional content about homemaking was becoming irrelevant, magazines shifted focus to the body itself. This shift was economically motivated and carefully calculated. As Betty Friedan had observed in The Feminine Mystique, advertisers preferred housewives as consumers because career women were "too critical" and less susceptible to marketing messages. When women fled domestic confinement, advertisers faced losing their primary consumer base. The beauty myth was developed to ensure that busy, stimulated working women would maintain the same insecure consumerism that had characterized their homebound predecessors. The $33-billion thinness industry and $20-billion youth industry emerged to replace the declining housewife market. The intensity of beauty imagery increased dramatically as competition for attention grew. By 1988, the average person in the United States saw 14% more television advertising than two years before - 650 TV messages weekly as part of 1,000 daily ad messages. Simultaneously, pornography became the biggest media category worldwide, generating an estimated $7 billion annually - more than the legitimate film and music industries combined. Mainstream media had to compete with increasingly extreme imagery, creating a spiral of escalation that normalized increasingly unrealistic beauty standards. The beauty myth in media operates through censorship as well as bombardment. Women's magazines cannot tell the whole truth about beauty products because cosmetics companies are their primary advertisers. Airbrushing age from women's faces is routine, and photographs of models' bodies are often digitally altered or physically trimmed. This censorship extends beyond women's magazines to any image of an older woman. The effect, as editor Dalma Heyn notes, is that "readers have no idea what a real woman's 60-year-old face looks like in print because it's made to look 45." This systematic erasure of natural female appearance creates a profound disconnect between women's lived experience and media representation.

Chapter 4: Beauty Standards as Religious Dogma and Moral Control

The beauty myth functions as a modern religion, complete with rituals, dogma, and moral imperatives that have effectively replaced traditional religious authority over women's lives. As organized religion's influence has declined in secular society, beauty practices have emerged to fill the spiritual void, providing women with a sense of moral purpose while simultaneously controlling their behavior. This beauty religion is a heady compound of various cults and belief systems, transforming itself with flexibility to offset the challenges posed by female autonomy. The weight control aspect of beauty religion operates as a classic cult, using established mind-control techniques. It follows an authoritarian structure where dieters follow "regimes" from which they must not deviate. It preaches renunciation of the world, as dieters give up pleasure in food and withdraw from social situations. Cult members believe they alone possess the truth, as women with weight obsessions ignore compliments because they feel they alone really know how repulsive their bodies are. The repetitive loop of calorie counting and body monitoring induces a hypnagogic state similar to that experienced by chanters in religious cults. Beauty religion draws heavily on Judeo-Christian creation mythology and concepts of sin. Because of the biblical story where Eve is created from Adam's rib, Western women absorb the sense that their bodies are second-rate, an afterthought. The beauty myth redefines original sin as being born not mortal, but female. Before the beauty backlash, girls and old women were exempt from beauty worship. But modern beauty religion recast original sin so that no young girl can feel it's too early to worry about the invisible stains of female ugliness - age or fat - waiting to be revealed. Nor can an older woman put these rituals behind her. Skin creams and diet books use the language of the prodigal son to draw their moral: Despite the sinner's wayward life, she is never forsaken and it's never too late to repent. The beauty religion employs classic techniques of political control. Three elements used by beauty rituals - hunger, fear of a chaotic future, and indebtedness - have been used throughout history by political leaders who want to keep an aggrieved population humble and quiescent. The religion teaches that a woman's beauty is not her own, just as traditional creeds said her sexuality belonged to others. She is guilty of transgression if she desecrates that beauty with impure substances or rich foods. What is beautiful about her body does not belong to her but to a higher power, while what is ugly is hers alone, proof of her sin. The international consequence of indoctrinating newly enfranchised women into these beauty rituals is that they are once more politically sedated. The beauty religion counters women's entry into the secular public world with medieval superstition. As women enter on a struggle with a world moving into a new millennium, they are increasingly weighed down with a potent belief system that keeps part of their consciousness locked in a way of thinking that the male world abandoned with the Dark Ages. The beauty myth is defended as if it derives from an eternal truth, even by people who approach other aspects of life with scientific skepticism.

Chapter 5: The Commodification of Female Sexuality Through Beauty

The beauty myth has fundamentally reshaped female sexuality by linking it inextricably to beauty standards. As women gained sexual freedom through contraception, legal abortion, and the dismantling of the sexual double standard, their sexuality was quickly restrained again by new social forces - beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism - which arose to put guilt, shame, and pain back into women's experience of sex. This transformation of sexuality represents one of the most profound aspects of the beauty myth's control over women's lives. Beauty pornography emerged in the 1970s when conventions of high-class pornographic photography began to be used generally to sell products to women. This made beauty thinking crucially different from all that had preceded it. Seeing a face anticipating orgasm, even if staged, became a powerful selling tool. In the absence of other sexual images, many women came to believe they must have that face, that body, to achieve sexual pleasure. The beauty myth teaches women that their "beauty" is their sexuality, when the truth goes the other way around - sexuality is an aspect of identity that beauty standards have colonized and commodified. Simultaneously, beauty sadomasochism became prevalent in advertising and fashion photography. Images of women being bound, threatened, or objectified flooded mainstream media. Fashion models adopted the furious pouting glare of the violated woman. By the 1980s, as many women were graduating with professional degrees, anger against women crackled the airwaves with a stupendous upsurge in violent sexual imagery. Film portrayals based on sex abusers became common, and the "first person" camera shot encouraged identification with the killer or rapist. These developments were not coincidental but calculated responses to women's increasing sexual autonomy. The harm of beauty pornography lies in how it represses female sexuality and lowers women's sexual self-esteem by casting sex as locked in a chastity belt to which "beauty" is the only key. Research shows that Western women's sexuality may be as endangered by the myth as the sexuality of many Eastern women is endangered through cruder practices. Despite the supposed sexual revolution, studies consistently show that large percentages of women do not regularly experience sexual pleasure or orgasm. Only 30% of women have orgasms regularly from intercourse without additional clitoral stimulation, and up to 45% do so during intercourse only with additional stimulation. The beauty myth creates a sexual self-consciousness that acts as an anaphrodisiac. Women caught in beauty thinking develop what Alice Walker calls the "self-critical sexual gaze." They become spectators of their own sexual experience, evaluating their appearance rather than focusing on sensation. In Nancy Friday's collection of female sexual fantasies, women repeatedly describe dissociating from their bodies during sex, imagining they are "beautiful" women rather than themselves. One woman writes: "The body was not this funny fat thing of mine, it wasn't me.... It was my beautiful sister." This sexual alienation serves powerful economic and political interests by preventing women from developing authentic sexual autonomy.

Chapter 6: Physical Consequences: Hunger, Surgery, and Bodily Harm

The beauty myth's demands have escalated to the point where they now inflict serious physical harm on women's bodies. What began as social pressure has evolved into industries that profit from women's physical pain and suffering. The most visible manifestation of this harm is the normalization of cosmetic surgery, which has transformed from a rare procedure for the wealthy into a mainstream expectation for average women. This surgical economy brings women into an alternative work reality based on ideas about the uses of human bodies that have not applied to men since the abolition of slavery. Cosmetic surgery represents a disturbing development in the beauty myth's evolution. The industry portrays the surgeon as an Artist-Priest, a more expert Creator than the maternal body or "Mother Nature." Surgeons describe female flesh as "clay or meat" to be sculpted into more acceptable forms. This language reveals the underlying belief that women's bodies are inherently flawed and require male intervention to achieve acceptability. The employer, through beauty requirements, can effectively demand that women permanently alter their bodies through painful, risky procedures. This creates a category that falls somewhere between a slave economy and a free market - in a free market, the worker's labor is sold to the employer, but her body remains her own. The issue of informed consent lies at the heart of the ethical problems surrounding cosmetic surgery. The Nuremberg Code, established after World War II to prevent medical abuses, emphasizes that patients must know all risks to provide genuine consent. Yet women seeking cosmetic surgery often receive incomplete or misleading information about the risks involved. When asked about liposuction risks, practitioners typically minimize or outright deny dangers, despite documented deaths from the procedure. One practitioner claimed there was "very little risk, very little" and denied any risk of death, though at least eleven American women had died from the procedure at that time. The consequences of beauty standards extend beyond surgery to include eating disorders, which have reached epidemic proportions. Anorexia has become the biggest killer of American teenage girls, with a death rate about 12 times higher than the annual death rate due to all causes of death among females ages 15-24. What was once considered anomalous marginal behavior is now so widespread as to be virtually normal. Whole sororities take for granted that bulimia is mainstream behavior, and models openly discuss their starvation regimes in women's magazines. The diet industry thrives on failure rather than success - 98% of dieters regain the weight, creating a self-generating and intrinsically expansive market. The "holy oil industry" - anti-aging skin creams - represents another form of physical and financial exploitation. For forty years, this industry has been selling women nothing at all while making false claims about retarding aging, repairing skin, and restructuring cells. With profit margins over 50% on revenue of 20 billion dollars worldwide, the industry is "little more than a massive con," according to industry exposés. Even insiders acknowledge the fraud: "There is no application, no topical application, that will get rid of grief or stress or heavy lines," admits Anita Roddick of The Body Shop. "There's nothing, but nothing, that's going to make you look younger." Perhaps most disturbing is how these harmful practices are marketed as empowerment. Women are told that painful, expensive procedures represent "taking control" of their appearance. This reframing of submission as liberation is a hallmark of the beauty myth's insidious nature. As Jane Fonda's exercise mantra puts it: "Discipline is Liberation" - a slogan deaf to its echo of totalitarian slogans like "War is Peace" and "Work is Freedom." The beauty myth makes women archaically morbid, surrounding them with the sense that they are under constant threat from invisible forces that can strike at any time, destroying what has been represented to them as life itself.

Chapter 7: Reclaiming Female Identity Beyond Beauty Standards

Liberation from the beauty myth requires both individual and collective action to reclaim female identity from the constraints of commercialized beauty standards. Women must first recognize that beauty standards are neither natural nor inevitable but politically constructed and economically motivated. This awareness allows women to view their appearance-related struggles not as personal failings but as responses to systemic pressures designed to undermine female advancement. The path forward involves developing critical consciousness about beauty culture while creating alternative frameworks for valuing female bodies and experiences. Women can begin reclaiming their bodies by developing a critical awareness of how beauty culture operates. This means questioning the images presented in media, recognizing manipulative advertising techniques, and understanding how beauty standards intersect with other systems of oppression like racism, classism, and ageism. It also means examining internalized beauty beliefs and working to replace self-criticism with self-acceptance. This critical consciousness creates space for women to resist beauty pressures without feeling guilty or inadequate for doing so. Pleasure offers a powerful antidote to beauty myth suffering. Women can reclaim sensual enjoyment of their bodies through movement, touch, and sexuality focused on internal sensation rather than external appearance. This shift from looking good to feeling good represents a revolutionary act in a culture that prioritizes women's visual appeal over their physical experience. Activities that connect women with their bodies' capabilities rather than appearances - like sports, dance, or sensual self-exploration - can help heal the mind-body split created by beauty culture. By prioritizing how their bodies feel rather than how they look, women can reconnect with authentic embodied experience. Creating alternative images and narratives about female bodies is essential for collective liberation. Women need to see diverse, authentic representations of other women - of all ages, sizes, colors, and abilities - living full, joyful lives without conforming to beauty standards. These counter-images help expand the cultural imagination beyond the narrow beauty ideal and provide models for different ways of inhabiting female bodies. Wolf calls for women to "insist on making culture out of our desire" by creating "paintings, novels, plays, and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden." These alternative representations would present female sexuality as diverse, embodied, and oriented toward pleasure rather than performance. A non-competitive vision of beauty would fundamentally transform how women relate to each other. Wolf envisions women becoming "gallant and chivalrous and flirtatious with one another" - complimenting and showing admiration without the undercurrent of comparison or resentment. This mutual appreciation would replace the "wary, defensive shoes-to-haircut glance" that currently characterizes many women's initial assessments of each other. Women could develop "codes of honor" that protect each other from the beauty myth's divisive effects - refusing to participate in situations where their beauty is used to diminish other women and rejecting the impulse to "jostle for random male attention." The freedom to age naturally represents perhaps the most radical rejection of the beauty myth. By embracing the natural changes in their bodies over time, women challenge the core premise that female value diminishes with age. The lines, gray hairs, and changing contours of an aging woman's body tell the story of a life fully lived - a story of experience, wisdom, and character that no amount of artificial "perfection" can match. When women reclaim their right to age naturally, they reclaim their full humanity and their place in the continuum of female experience across generations.

Summary

The beauty myth operates as a sophisticated system of social control that has adapted to counter women's increasing political and economic power. Rather than liberating women from appearance pressures, each feminist advance has been met with intensified beauty standards that redirect women's energy and resources away from challenging male dominance. This counterattack works by transforming political issues into personal problems, convincing women that their feelings of inadequacy stem from individual flaws rather than systematic oppression. The genius of the beauty myth lies in its ability to make women complicit in their own subjugation while believing they are exercising free choice. The path beyond the beauty myth requires both personal and collective transformation. Individually, women must recognize how beauty standards have colonized their relationship with their bodies and sexuality, replacing authentic experience with performance oriented toward external validation. Collectively, women must rebuild solidarity by refusing to participate in beauty competition and creating alternative cultural representations that celebrate female diversity. The ultimate goal is not to reject beauty itself but to reclaim it as a source of pleasure rather than obligation - to create what Wolf calls "a pro-woman definition of beauty" that "reflects our redefinitions of what power is." When beauty becomes playful, voluntary, and diverse rather than compulsory and standardized, women will finally be free to experience their bodies as sources of joy rather than sites of perpetual inadequacy.

About Author

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Naomi Wolf

Naomi Wolf is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Beauty Myth, The End of America and Give Me Liberty. She has toured the world speaking to audiences of all walks of life about gender equality, social justice, and, most recently, the defense of liberty in America and internationally. She is the cofounder of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, which teaches ethics and empowerment to young women leaders, and is also a cofounder of the American Freedom Campaign, a grass roots democracy movement in the United States whose mission is the defense of the Constitution and the rule of law.from http://naomiwolf.org/

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