Rating: 
Summary: It's not about Beauty anyway
Review: Let me explain my circumstances while reading Beauty Myth. The book was used and someone made comments throughout the book in the margins. The comments enlivened the book a bit. The previous reader essentially called Wilde a whiner and a liar as the author presented her view of women as resentful, man-made beauty queens.
After thinking about Beauty Myth over a series of months, I find this book does overly victimize women. Women are not stupid. We buy the magazines, watch the news, watch commercials and watch the shows that continue to idolize the thin female. Women have money and money dictates what is acceptable.
No one is forcing women to look skinny. We're kidding ourselves. If we really wanted to start a revolution and dispel the Beauty Myth we'd stop watching soap operas, stop watching shows were the starlet is 10 pounds underweight, we'd stop buying magazines that tell us how to loose twenty pounds in 2 weeks and we'd stop making dewy eyes over merchandise that is sold by supermodels. Are we doing this? No.
We are telling the advertisers that want and need to make money that they don't need to change what they are doing, because we (educated women with money) are still buying.
This whole thing is not about Beauty anyway. It's truly about feeling loved. This is an ancient and eternal issue. It will not find resolve in books, but in the lone heart of a woman as she does battle and makes due with her self-esteem.
Rating: 
Summary: Deeply Flawed Central Thesis
Review: The first edition of this book had several factual errors and exaggerations. To her credit, Wolf has corrected some of these errors. However, the main thesis of her book, and a deeply flawed one at that, has remained unchanged. Wolf argues that having been scared by the increasing successes and power of women in the West, some men decided that the best way to put women in their rightful place is to occupy their thoughts with self-appearance and starve them.
Some concern with self-appearance is not difficult to understand. Humans have a basic aesthetic sense and desire attractive mates. Therefore, where one ranks on an attractiveness scale should be somewhat of a concern to many people because one realizes that others also desire attractive mates. Women often tend to be very selective with respect to choosing a male partner, and the men whom they desire, usually having their choice of women, will naturally go after the more attractive ones. Hence the reason many women are preoccupied with their looks...they want the best man they can obtain and know that men value beauty. If women were less choosy about men, they would need to be far less concerned about their looks because some men will sleep with almost anything. Surely, patriarchy cannot be blamed for making women choosy about men because most men would prefer that women have lower standards.
It is true that female high fashion models tend to be young and skinny; however, these models also tend to have multiple traits more typical of men, i.e., they tend to closely approximate the physique of adolescent boys. This should not be difficult to understand if one considers the fact that the typical high fashion designer is a male homosexual. See a newly published book in this regard: "The Nature of Homosexuality: Vindication for Homosexual Activists and the Religious Right." For a visual comparison of haute couture models vs. glamour models, see the supporting materials for this book at amazinginfoonhomosexuals.com.
Influenced by the high status of haute couture models, several women diet unnecessarily and may also indulge in excessive exercise. Male [...] fashion designers are to blame for this, not patriarchy. Once you control for the influence of high fashion models-courtesy male [...] fashion designers-and fashions, the beauty industry is largely responding to a mostly innate desire among women to make themselves attractive but is not generating this desire.
Rating:
Summary: An eye opener
Review: Interesting to me that the male reviewers seemed to uniformly hate this book! Settle down, guys--we're not all going to stop shaving and exercising, and if you don't have Paris Hilton panting over you, believe me, it's NOT because of anything Naomi Wolf said!
Whatever I may think of the author and her philosophy, as a rule I like a book that makes me see things in ways I hadn't before. This was one of those books. I don't agree with everything the author writes, but after borrowing it from the library, I had to buy it for myself so I could write in the margins about all the "a-ha!" moments it prompted. Sadly for those who like black and white, beauty, like most things, is on a continuum. People cite Etcoff's "Survival of the Prettiest" in opposition to this book, but if the premises of "Prettiest" were completely true, then after thousands upon thousands of years of evolution, why aren't we all collectively lovely? Why aren't the women who have the most offspring (ie, the fittest) also the Cindy Crawford clones? One of my former evolution professors, David Wilson, just published a study showing that people who shared common goals and interests rated each other as more attractive than they rated strangers.
I'm short, overweight, and past my prime in years, but I'm evolutionarily fitter than average (3 children), and have a strong husband who is a good provider (the biologically desired currency for males), and he even loves me!--from where I stand, it looks like most women can safely drop a lot of their beauty obsession, and I think Wolf says a lot that would encourage us to.
Rating: 
Summary: A new perspective
Review: It is an eye-opener. Why is that, really, that commercials, even aimed at women, have sexual connotations? After I read this book, I flipped through the resent Cosmo: the only ads that DO NOT have sexual connotations are the ones for tampons and pads. What's wrong with getting old? Why is every new wrinkle becomes such a tragedy for women? Why do women STILL, ten years after this book was first published, say, in numerous surveys, that they'd rather loose 20 pouns than achieved a personal/career goal? This book does make me angry. But it also makes me think, and look from a different perspective on the world. Definite must-read for all women.
Rating:
Summary: changed my life
Review: it was translated to hebrew lately. i just finished reading it now. i'm so glad i read it. its full of amazing ideas. important to weman of all ages. what can i say? read it.
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