Beauty Myth

In her eponymous book, Naomi Wolf defines The Beauty Myth as “a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement” (1991, 9).

The beauty myth ties a woman's value and power to how attractive she is, and promises that if she can just attain “beauty,” then she will be happy. For Wolf, this promise is patently false, a political weapon used against women to keep them in their place. While this myth is as old as patriarchy, Wolf traces its most recent incarnation to the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was born out of the Industrial Revolution, built on the male breadwinner/submissive female helpmate dyad, supporting new capitalist work arrangements. Since then, the myth has flourished whenever “material constraints on women are dangerously loosened” (11). With each surge in women's public power, each victory in the battle over female bodily control, came a corresponding backlash of idealized images that become slimmer with every decade. Thus, winning the vote in the early 1900s gave rise to a new ideal embodied by the boyish figure of the 1920s flapper. The stick thin model Twiggy rose to fame in the wake of new freedom wrought by the birth control pill in the 1960s. In this view, women's increased corporate and political leadership in the 1990s inversely reflects the “waif” and size zero fashion models' shrinking dimensions, currently in fashion.

Wolf's The Beauty Myth encapsulated ideas advanced by feminists over the last several decades. Susie Orbach's famous 1970s proclamation that “Fat is a feminist issue!” led to Wolf's trenchant observation: “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one” (187). She cites 1980s feminist Sandra Bartky's take on Michel Foucault, who linked the idea that “docile bodies” implicitly include “disciplines that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine,” citing bodily practices that limit the size of women's bodies, their shape, the amount of space they take up, and how they are displayed as examples (1998, 27).

The beauty myth evinces the idea that women are controlled in ways that men are not, when it comes to the size, shape, and meaning of their bodies. It claims women live under what Kim Chernin (1981) called a “tyranny of slenderness” that keeps them distracted by dieting and exercise, too obedient and weakened to fight for their right to better pay, equal rights, and a life free from widespread violence against women. Susan Bordo nuanced and developed this claim in her incisive examination of advertising's strong messages about gender, arguing that men are not the enemy [Page 91]but rather the enemy is a contemporary system of diet and exercise disciplines that “train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands” (1993, 27).

The beauty myth is closely tied to consumerism, fueling a constant desire for beauty, dieting, and fitness products. Feminists note that the booming American weight loss, dieting, and cosmetic industries are built on the backs of women struggling to attain impossible goals of physical perfection. They claim that ideals promoted by the fashion and beauty industries, supported by extensive advertising campaigns, have a long history of creating unnecessary “needs” for whiter teeth, shinier hair, or stylish clothes to stimulate consumption. The general contention is the more women's power in the workplace, in politics, and domestic life grows, the more idealized images of her body shrink. Many cite the shrinking measurements of Miss America pageant winners, fashion models, and Playboy centerfolds over the years, such as the finding that “25% of fashion models now meet the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa” (Hesse-Biber 2007, 5). When diet and exercise fail, some argue the beauty myth pushes growing numbers of women to seek cosmetic surgery, maxing out credit cards or tying themselves to crippling installment plans to pay for these procedures in the process. According to the American Society of Plastic surgeons, since 1992, the number of breast augmentations has increased by 657% and liposuctions by 412%.

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