Naomi Wolf – The Beauty Myth
Women are abused by modernity! That is the essential message here and it is bang on the mark. Wolf’s is a very good polemical book with a few fantastic insights in to the world of female beauty, how it is a totally fabricated patriarchal construct and non-conforming behaviour will be, and is pilloried. Although written in 1991 its central argument still holds, that looks, whether “bad” or “good”, are simply chains with which society ties women. In fact the books central theme is probably truer now than ever with the advent of 24 hour celebrity news, the internet and the rise of the paparazzi with all their subscribing magazines and newspapers. Plastic surgery and cosmetics are still growth industries, both of which exist only because of the fear of not looking “right”.
Wolf asserts that the beauty myth attacks women through five different areas; work, religion, sex, violence and hunger, and the concept provided a strong theme within the broader context of third-wave feminism. As with all books like this, there are some moments you find it hard to agree with the strong rhetoric, and the means to certain ends, but it is well written and deserves reading by anyone who thinks women have it easy now they can vote and have jobs, and indeed by women themselves who succumb to this beauty myth daily; which is most women.
Sarah
redosiris
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The only problem that I can find with Wolf’s book is that it doesn’t have a class analysis connected with it. In other words, she sees sexism as going across all classes, affecting all women in equally horrible ways, and so doesn’t argue that some women suffer from sexism while others do not. That’s the real problem with what she argues, because she’ll often speak one moment of a poor, working class woman suffering and struggling to get by, and then the next moment she’ll speak of elite middleclass women journalists trying to get the best jobs in the media world.
The notion then is that women like Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher experience sexism in the same ways and forms as ordinary working class women, which is a ridiculous position to take in reality. Obviously the poorer a woman is, the less financial means she has in escaping from the hardship that women are forced into experiencing by how the system is designed.
It then begs the question that a class analysis should be included to explaining women’s oppression, and it’s here when Wolf doesn’t go here, mostly because she’s a feminist, meaning she is left with no other choice but to adopt some of feminism’s flaws conclusions.
In reality, the oppression that women suffer from, particularly things concerning beauty, are directly correlated with the poverty and working class nature that most women materially belong to. Remember, beauty is all about drawing a line of separation, on the one hand we have the beautiful supermodels (ie what every woman wants to be), and they are happy and living a great life, full of riches, and then we have you the ordinary working class woman who cannot afford to purchase the products to make yourself beautiful, and then you can only ever wash your face and put on a little something before going to work each day.
In that way, beauty doesn’t exist in and of itself, but contrarily works correspondingly with the material and class differences.
Thanks for your comment.
I think you’re right, from what I now recall of the book, there is a class distinction that is missing from the analysis. Clearly it’s true that successful women, those born in to wealthy families etc aren’t affected in the same way by misogyny and sexism as a woman living on a council estate whose punishment is two fold, first for being working class and second for being female. It is important to make this wider point.
That said, when it comes to the beauty industry their targets are overwhelmingly those middle and upper class women who have money to spend in the first place on make-up, perfume and pseudo-science anti-wrinkle creams. The end result for working class women is a bi-product of ‘affluenza’; I can’t afford it but I still “need” it, whereas middle class women can afford it, waste their money and feel no better at the end of it so who out of the two is better off? Neither, it’s quite a spurious question, both feel bad for different reasons thanks to the same catalyst.
I agree with you that almost everything is class based and I think can be boiled down to a Marxist interpretation of alienation from one’s self thanks to the external factors of capitalism. I think it is important to recognise within the wider feminist movement that the rich can feel just as exploited as anyone else, and that’s the point of exploitation, it’s how it makes you feel. Your boundaries may be different from others but the feelings evoked when those boundaries are crossed are much the same.
The following book, along similar lines may have the angle you are looking for, I’ve not read it myself but I’m assured it’s a good critique of class differences in the world of fashion and beauty: