Rating: 
Summary: on "hunger"
Review: In her controversial bestseller, Wolf posits a relationship between female liberation and female beauty in which women pay for every economic and political success with another restrictive or subordinate measure at the hands of a brutalizing patriarchy. The backlash against everything feminism has achieved is a demanding and punitive "beauty myth" that keeps women in place by proscribing impossible models of femininity, creating insecurity and self-hatred that can then be easily exploited by the fashion world, Hollywood, glossy magazines, and the lucrative diet and cosmetic surgery industries. In an unforgettable move in her chapter on "Hunger," Wolf turns the tables and describes the mysterious disease ravaging America's best and brightest young men, ostensibly leaving Dartmouth's star quarterback and the editor of the Harvard Crimson resembling Holocaust victims. After six paragraphs of expounding on how "the future is committing suicide," Wolf reveals that in fact the apocalyptic phenomenon she describes is very real, but occurring among women rather than men. Like the Minnesota study, "Hunger" reminds us of the gravity and violence of anorexia and bulimia. Wolf's rhetorical trick might be even more powerful now than at its initial reception because it defamiliarizes eating disorders and shocks even those of us who have long been exposed to their reality; such a shock may well be the only tactic for communicating with young girls so steeped in disordered culture that reading online "tips and tricks" for throwing up from girls in hospital beds is assimilated unproblematically.
Rating:
Summary: If you're not angry, you're not awake
Review: The day before I read this book, I was leafing through a fashion/beauty magazine which included a breakdown of what the "average woman" spends on beauty products and treatments each year. Their featured "average woman" spent around $12,000 a year on cosmetics, hair cuts, face cream, facials, and other beauty "essentials." How lucky for their average woman that she's not earning minimum wage!The magazine, seeming to realize how excessive that figure was, gave women tips on what products they could cut back on and only buy the $7 version of because the $25 version is no better. So why do women still spend money on $25 wrinkle treatments? Perhaps because magazines like this spend a couple of pages every month hard selling them? What Naomi Wolf's book really made me realize was not so much how much our culture sells women pointless products and pressures them into striving for a certain narrow picture of beauty, but the extent to which it has harmed women in so many areas - not just with obvious things like eating disorders, but with the degree of violence which women become willing to perpetrate against themselves, as well as the ecomonic impact on women. Men may argue that they too have things they are "pressured" to take part in or judged by, but these examples are disingenous, things that large numbers of men do not take part in, and not something on which their ability to even hold a job is affected by. Men are not fired as they get older, *purely because of their looks.* Men who feel attacked by the fact that Wolf regards this control of women as part of the patriarchal structure and plan evidently miss the point that patriarchy does not equal all men. Wolf is not blaming men, she is blaming patriarchy - and there is a big difference. It is about a consciousness, a structure, a manner of relating and behaving to the world, whether the people working in the beauty companies or the media are male or female (though it is a truth that the vast majority of the financial/corporate and political power in the Western world is controlled by men). Men can be and are oppressed by patriarchy, and other books have addressed this topic, but they don't happen to be oppressed in this particular way so it is not something relevant that Wolf's book needed to address.
Rating: 
Summary: The gender agenda
Review: Naomi Wolf has written a winner for the women's political movement with the 'Beauty Myth'. However, she has done it with flawed logic and misuse of facts to further the female political agenda. The book offers many valid and potent messages, however had the inconsistencies been better concealed the impact would have been more powerful. Lacking a logical thread and qualification, it is filled with contradictions, and clearly unsubstantiated conclusions. The premise of the book, that women are oppressed by external beauty, is driven systematically and maliciously by a male dominated society. This is done to prevent women from achieving full liberation and taking their rightful place in society, truly a cosmetic shackle. In past generations, pregnancy and childbirth were not easily avoidable, creating 'prisoners of the womb'. Advances in contraception now offer greater freedom to women while civic liberty, access to workplace opportunities, and equal social standing have all been hard fought battles. With liberation close at hand, males scrambled to remain dominant. For this they fabricated the 'beauty myth'. Women found themselves pursuing material outer beauty, a clearly trivial, disempowering exercise. Rejecting any link to bio-logic Wolf posits that slimmers ailments, cosmetic surgery, violence and the like, were designed by men to retain control. This approach is simplistic, avoids gender neutral social conformity, and ironically, denies women responsibility over their own destiny. Many valid observations are made on diet and hunger, and their enslavement of female bodies and minds. Commercial hunger sells cosmetic manipulation to the desire for slim and young beauty. Yet no connection is made to the enslavement of all human society, male and female. While the outcomes differ, the conformance mechanisms are principally the same for both genders. Wolf highlights social aspects that affect women without providing a balanced view of those affecting men. The claim our society condones female mutilation, but not male, ignores obvious examples in the extreme endeavours of sport, war and adventure that men are driven to pursue. Should we put this down to how women manipulate male behaviour and therefore a female responsibility? The predominantly western beauty myth around which this book is based, is helped in part, by mothers teaching their daughters behaviour that will result in diet and image related problems from adolescence. Wolf discounts any female responsibility for this, instead blaming media and institutions who manipulate the female psyche. These faceless organisations of the beauty industry are staffed with high numbers of women, none of them responsible. Men carry the burden of deliberately creating and promulgating the exploitation of women through the beauty industry. Women are puppets, from the hungry models to the countless millions that buy the percieved trivia of magazines and beauty aids, removing wrinkles, fat, hair, clothing etc, while men do 'real' things like run businesses, climb mountains and race Formula 1 motor cars. Wolf does concede that some men do not support this tyranny - she almost allows herself to see some of the real issues her book fails to address - but the pull of preconceived ideas proves too strong and the needle slips back in the groove. She discounts any innate biological basis for beauty in human mating behaviour. The issue of ageing women she puts down to male fear of the power in older women, not entertaining the idea that younger women offer better breeding prospects than old. Like any good politician Wolf is not distracted by facts. Ironically, in building her case that men are totally responsible for the oppression of women, she denies women control over their own lives. She asks that women be 'allowed' to take their rightful place in the running the world as a better place for all, yet her book takes pains to show how little responsibility they have taken for their lives in the past. Why then, are things going to change, is responsibility parcelled out like food in a famine? You either control things, or you don't. Having someone allow you to control is no control at all. Our impact on society is measured by our contribution, or lack of. Wolf has unwittingly disempowered her own gender, possibly doing more harm than good to the female cause, by denying them any responsibility in todays world. My criticism of this book, to this point, has been as one-eyed as the book itself. There is no question men and women share equal responsibility for our world. We both have strengths and weaknesses, being different sides of the same coin. Until cloning becomes a practical reality for human reproduction - and it will - men and women are locked into the contradictions of conflict and cooperation that color many intimate relationships. Power struggles are an unavoidable consequence. There is also no question that the victims of eating disorders like anorexia, cosmetics and hair removal show enslavement of individual women to practices, that by relative human standards, are harmful or sometimes fatal, and I do not question their suffering. What is not offered is a balanced social context of men and women. Men are victim to the same processs, though the specific outcomes differ. A parallel book could be written about the enslavement of males to their bizarre habit of fighting in national and personal wars, dying in reckless adventure and sporting events, crashing fast cars, the list is endless. All this, in an attempt to gain status and control among ourselves, in order to improve our chances with women. Why should we hold men responsible for this behaviour? We all know it was Helen's face that launched a thousand ships in the Trojan War, and not the men sitting inside, clutching swords. As a gender political book, the Beauty Myth is powerful and worth reading. However, for those readers looking for objectivity, not political rhetoric, this book will disappoint.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating
Review: This book is not a condemnation of beauty--Wolf herself is an exceptionally beautiful woman--but is rather a critique of 'beauty' as a saleable product. While some of the statistics are exagerrated, the basic concepts of the book are grounded in reality. The chaper that compares the marketing strategies of cosmetics companies to cult indoctrination is brilliant, and will be especially useful to older women. Though Wolf's fervor is sometimes embarassing, the book aids the reader in learning a "new way to see" that is pro-beauty and pro-woman.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading
Review: This book altered my whole perception of beauty as it is presented culturally and socially. I just wish I had read it when I was an impressionable teenager. Furthermore, I wish that everyone who claims that feminists have nothing left to fight for would read this book. Wolf's well written and thought provoking take on Western society's obsession with beauty clearly proves that we unfortunately have a long way to go until men and women are truly equal. Warning! This book may cause a great deal of rage and a sense of hopelessness. Don't be discouraged by all the depressing statistics that Ms Wolf presents - make a wow to yourself and all the other women out there to refuse to silently accept to be objectified and lessened. That, and not the latest miracle cream from L'Oreal, is what we are truly worth.
Rating: 
Summary: Nooooo! That's All Wrong!
Review: Diet, exercise, make-up, orthodontia, Rogaine, plastic surgery, well-chosen clothes...Do whatever it takes to be beautiful! It's an eternal value, not something invented by Madison Avenue. As you grow old, just pray your erudition, compassion, and material success compensate for your accumulating wrinkles. "Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God." --Jean Anouilh A recovered anorexic and grad school virgin, Naomi Wolf is stuck in a 1960s and 70s victim-mongering feminism. Even Wolf soulmate and "Backlash" author Susan Faludi started to see that female beauty confers intimidating status and sympathize with the powerlessness of men in her latest book "Stiffed" (1999). "I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want--an adorable pancreas?" --Jean Kerr When Susan Brownmiller, Germaine Greer, and Betty Friedan wrote about women's belittling mistreatment 30 or 40 years ago, it was called for. MUCH has happened since then. Naomi Wolf missed the train. Women are now 60% of North American college students and climbing. They're at the center of families and enjoy custody privileges when a family breaks up. They live seven years longer than men and have much lower rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, learning disabilities, mental retardation, and disorders such as autism and hemophilia. If a woman is beautiful besides, this is icing on the cake. "Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: You can smell it and that is all." --Somerset Maugham Naomi Wolfe should go have chi tea and hommus with Andrea Dworkin (followed by a game or two of Scrabble?). They can picnic in the shadow of the Ugly Tree from which one of them fell (Ms. Dworkin) and commiserate about how vicious men are. They can then go off and be "roommates" together in a grass hut, away from all that men have done to culture--like the telephone, the computer, the airplane, and electric light. "Everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence." --Friedrich Nietzsche [...]P>"Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature." --Camille Paglia
Rating:
Summary: So true
Review: This is a good book for any person that is upset with the media and the values that society upholds. I agreed with most of the book and read it very quickly. A good book to read on your own or maybe even for a women's studies course.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of paper
Review: I can't help thinking about those poor trees slaughtered for printing this book!!! This is the silliest and faultiest book I've read in years. It's an insult to the intelligence of readers and an insult to women. The pseudo-scientific tone with lots of statistics is just a disguise for a weak and biased thesis. Logical fallacies abound and the notes are a mess. Here's my interpretation of Wolf's ideas: Beauty is a very recent thing invented by men, women's magazines, the cosmetics industry and the plastic surgeons. It's an invention aimed at keeping women busy and unhappy. Since women are much more productive than men are, men would succeed in keeping women out of the power structure by keeping them busy in trying to look pretty. By keeping women unhappy for not being as pretty as the models in the magazines the cosmetic and plastic surgery industry would make billions of dollars by taking ever increasing shares of women's paychecks. Wolf ends the book with a sort of manifesto in which she invites all women to slow down with the grooming in order to free themselves from the tyranny of men, cosmetics and plastic surgeons. Ugly women of the world unite - she could have written. Now the problems with the theory: * Beauty is not a new invention
It's not even a human invention. For more details on this check Desmond Morris' books such as The Naked Ape or Intimate Behavior or check the excellent Nancy Etcoff's Survival of the Prettiest. * Women have brains
Men, women's magazines, plastic surgeons and the cosmetic industry cannot control the minds of over three billion women. If that sort of control were possible the ice-cream industry would use it as well and promote fat as beautiful therefore increasing tenfold its sales. * The idea that women can unite against the "Beauty Myth" is tremendously naive. The reason why women use beauty as a strategy is because it works. If a significant part of the female population were to listen to Wolf's ideas and stop grooming themselves the rewards for the few women who would ignore the manifesto would be very high. With the increase in the number of women following Wolf the reward for not following her would grow exponentially since there would be less competition for men or whatever other reward there is for looking pretty. It would be an unstable system and very soon it would fall apart. The book is very weird. At a certain point, just out of the blue, the author states that she is still a virgin. Her virginity is not my business, actually nobody's business other than her own so why declare it? It sounds like Britney Spears. Now for me, reading on a book written by a Doctoral candidate a statement that she is still a virgin sends alarm bells going off everywhere. On another weird chapter the author gets very personal and describes again out of the blue how she became anorexic by the age 13 and all the suffering that followed. I take that as an insurance policy - you might not like my book but if I tell you how much I have suffered you might at least like me. Take my advice, save your money, save your time, and, for God's sake, save those innocent trees. Look around and get yourself a better book.
Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Perspective
Review: In this text, Naomi Wolf argues that women are oppressed in today's society primarily through The Beauty Myth. Essentially, the beauty myth is comprised of an impossible standard of physical beauty that all women should strive for. This standard of beauty causes women to be preoccupied with their outward appearance. However, Wolf notes that this myth is really NOT about women at all; Men created to keep women in a subordinate place in society. Wolf proposes that the beauty myth serves to hinder any further advances in the feminist movement. Wolf exposes and describes all facets of the beauty myth and gives examples of it plays out in our society. All women should read this book in order to understand just how deeply rooted the beauty myth is in our society. With this knowledge, we can reject it, and in doing so, continue to work our way towards getting the respect we deserve.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful, incisive, and an interesting read!
Review: In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argues that our culture's images of beauty -- found on television and in advertisements, women's magazines, and pornography -- are detrimental to women, as well as to the men who love them. She demonstrates that the concept of "beauty" is a weapon used to make women feel badly about themselves; after all, no one can live up to the ideal. Wolf DOES agree that beauty plays a legitimate role in our lives and in our attractions to one another. The problem, she says, is when beauty is defined as thinness, pertness, and youthfulness taken to extremes -- extremes that are literally unattainable for healthy women. And I agree.
Wolf's book explores 6 areas of life in which problems result from the beauty myth. Each has its own chapter that can be read on its own and still make perfect sense. I suggest starting with whichever interests you the most. They are as follows: * WORK. Here, the author details the way the concept of "beauty" can be used to discriminate against women in the workforce. If women are too pretty, we're not taken seriously; if women aren't pretty enough, we can legally be fired for their perceived "homeliness." Then again, if we're too pretty, it's our own fault when they're sexually harassed; if we're not pretty enough, people doubt men would have actually harassed them. The author offers a dizzying list of legal cases lost by women which demonstrate the extent of this catch-22 -- compelling stuff. * CULTURE. This focuses on the role of women's magazines (the sole arbiter of women's culture) in shaping our lives, by selling us on the need for beauty products by making us feel bad about themselves. It also notes that advertisers pressure the magazines into this, because only if women feel terrible about themselves will high-income women spend a quarter (yes, a quarter) of their each paycheck on beauty products. * RELIGION. Convincingly argues that the quest for thinness has replaced the quest for moral virtue and heavenly salvation, and shows how this quest has the same effects that religion once did -- of keeping women submissive and preoccupied. * SEX. Demonstrates that the beauty myth actually supresses female sexuality by making many women too self-conscious to engage in sex freely and comfortably, and moreover, that excessive dieting leads to a diminished sex drive. It also argues that the beauty myth hurts men by making them unaware of what real women look like, and by giving them the role of "appraiser of beauty" instead of the role of "partner" -- further impacting sexual relations. * HUNGER. The beauty myth convinces women to "willingly" go hungry, to eat fewer calories per day than famine victims in third-world countries, which results in ironic weight gain and/or in eating disorders (compulsive eating, anorexia, and bulemia). Includes a compelling account of the author's own battle with anorexia. * VIOLENCE. This is not about domestic violence, but rather the self-inflicted violence of cosmetic surgery, which is so painful and damaging to the body. Interesting comparisons with Victorian sexual surgery and with potentially deadly experimental medical research (which is unethical). The author questions why so many women are willing to risk diminished erotic responses and even death in order to be made thin or small-nosed or large-breasted or whatever. Her conclusion is that culture implies that women are better off dead than old or ugly-looking, making it a reasonable risk. In conclusion, this is a very strong, compelling book. At times, some of what Wolf says is a bit hard to swallow -- but read as a whole, it presents a solid argument about the sickness of our society today. Men, read it for your wives; parents, read it for your daughters; and ladies, read it for yourself. Highly recommended.
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