The Beauty Myth

The “Culture” chapter examines different aspects of both high and “low” (mass) culture. This category includes well-known female characters in classic literature such as plays by William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov, women’s magazines, and the media in general. The chapter also addresses censorship. Wolf suggests that culture shapes societal perceptions of women’s roles as well as the way women perceive themselves.

According to Wolf, patriarchal culture enshrines individual men and anonymous, albeit beautiful women. This pattern occurs because our culture is simultaneously constructed by men observing women and women watching themselves be observed.

The author focuses on the way women are reduced to stereotypical either/or qualities such as being beautiful or smart rather than complex individuals. Some examples in classic literature include the characters Dunyasha and Anya in The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov. Furthermore, while beauty is exalted, it is considered a mere “accident of nature” and not heroic or valuable (58). Girls learn this type of thinking early on, where men are valorized for their bravery or intellect and women are not. Wolf gives the example of Eve, who is beautiful and perfect, created from Adam’s rib, and becomes a villain when she exercises her intellect and independence.

Moving away from high culture, this dualist thought process is solidified in mass consumer culture such as women’s magazines. The author believes that these publications possess ambivalent traits, inducing both pleasure and anxiety in the reader. Mass culture covers female advancement and promotes the beauty myth at the same time. Historically, women’s magazines typically followed the trends of the given time, from Victorian domesticity to women’s participation in World War I. The author briefly reviews the developments in women’s magazines from the Victorian period to the late 20th century. In the Victorian period, magazines told women that they belonged in the domestic sphere, but World War I magazines promoted female employment in wartime industries (62). After World War I, domesticity dominated popular magazines until World War II. In the 1950s, mass culture emphasized female domesticity with even greater fervor as millions of American and British women either quit or were fired from their wartime jobs. 1950s American mass culture pushed the idea that a woman could only be fulfilled as “a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient homemaker” (64). Advertising and other media emphasized seeking perfection in these roles alone and generally ignoring the public sphere.

In the 1950s, advertising grew in importance as a source of revenue, and the priorities shifted to marketing household products. This changed over time as middle-class women began reentering the workforce. By the 1980s, the focus of advertising changed again to selling cosmetic products rather than promoting housework since this niche appealed to professional women. Selling beauty products depends on generating anxiety and insecurity about one’s looks, and advertising revenue grew significantly as the culture emphasized thinness and looking youthful. After the feminine mystique of domesticity was no longer relevant, “all that was left was the body” (67). Wolf details the way magazines kept themselves afloat by inventing problems with women’s appearances where there were none before and selling solutions through editorials and advertisements.

Next, the author reviews many of the stereotypes in the media about feminists fighting for women’s rights. These stereotypes ranged from discrediting feminists as ugly and “unsexed” to devaluing their intelligence by focusing on their beauty. For example, Esquire magazine profiled leading second-wave feminist Gloria Steinem as an “intellectual’s pinup” because of her good looks. As in the workplace, women were reduced to either/or stereotypes: They were either too pretty and, therefore, unserious, or smart but ugly.

Wolf argues that women’s magazines are one of the only broad platforms through which women can participate in women’s culture. As a result, they are sucked into the beauty myth, the presentation of which is defined by the advertiser. In a twist of irony, the beauty myth also brings women together to commiserate about not measuring up.

Another important aspect of women’s magazines is the curated nature of information and outright censorship. Simply put, they present information about cosmetic products based on the advertiser’s requirements. Wolf highlights a paradox between Western values that supposedly love freedom and hate censorship and the highly controlled information about the beauty myth, from lying about airbrushing to misrepresenting cosmetics as miracle cures.