The Beauty Myth

“‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.”

Wolf briefly reviews the way beauty standards are culturally and historically relative rather than immutable, objective ideals. The author then links beauty standards to political control, used to prevent social mobility based on merit alone.

“The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power. The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance.”

The author argues that the beauty myth is neither about aesthetics nor women. She suggests that female beauty and femininity are defined by the desirable traits and modus operandi within a particular form of patriarchal control. For example, for 19th-century Victorians, domesticity was considered feminine.

“Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.”

Wolf traces the history of women entering the workforce in greater numbers since World War II. She believes that the beauty myth is used to control and delegitimize working women because they demonstrated their capacity for professional competition based on merit, talent, productivity, and resilience.

“For every feminist action there is an equal and opposite beauty myth reaction.”

The author references Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The law describes the equal, physical forces that act on an object. She believes that whenever feminists make gains for women’s rights, the patriarchal society responds by challenging them. One such response is the beauty myth used to control women.

“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it.”

In this chapter, the author discusses the paradox of feminist advancement in the realm of women’s rights, especially in the professional sphere, and the institutionalization of the beauty myth used to constrain this advancement. She argues that women are required to look feminine to be able to maintain employment and climb the career ladder. At the same time, they cannot look too feminine because that is perceived as “inviting” sexual harassment. 

“Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.”

Wolf compares the way men and women are portrayed in high culture and mass culture. She argues that men are depicted as multifaceted individuals whereas women are often reduced to two-dimensional stereotypes. These stereotypes include depicting women by using simple, either/or categories, such as beauty or brains.

“The beauty myth, in its modern form, arose to take the place of the Feminine Mystique, to save magazines and advertisers from the economic fallout of the women’s revolution.”

The Feminine Mystique is a term coined by second-wave feminist Betty Friedan to describe being trapped by domesticity. At this time, women’s magazines chiefly advertised household products, which were a key source of their revenue. Once more American women entered the workforce after the 1950s, women’s magazines had to change their advertising strategies or go out of business. Advertisers began to sell different cosmetic and skin care products and create problems for women—which their products claimed to solve—where there were none before.

“The rituals of the beauty backlash do not simply echo traditional religions and cults but functionally supplant them. They are literally reconstituting out of old faiths a new one, literally drawing on traditional techniques of mystification and thought control, to alter women’s minds as sweepingly as any past evangelical wave.”

The chapter on religion is one of the most extensive sections in this book. This is the case because the author both examines the patriarchal roots of religions like Christianity and links them to the new “religion" of beauty in the context of mass culture (86). This type of “beauty” is used to control women despite their political and professional advancement. Wolf’s main argument is that this new “religion” comprises traditional imagery and techniques because they are effective.

“The Rites of Beauty redefine original sin as being born not mortal, but female. Before the backlash, girls and old women were exempt from participation in worship—and therefore outside the ranks of potential consumers.”

Wolf argues that there are several parallels between traditional religions like Christianity and the marketing of beauty within mass culture. One such parallel is original sin. The original sin of Christianity is rooted in Adam’s fall in the Garden of Eden. The original sin of the beauty myth is being a woman. A woman is never too young, too old, too overweight, or too slender to be “fixed,” so she adheres to the beauty myth by purchasing an endless supply of skincare and cosmetic products.

“The purification cycle often follows the seasons: Women who feel they have “something to hide” dread summer’s approach, anxious that hot weather and full exposure will not overtake them before they have fasted and flagellated themselves into blameless readiness.”

The author compares the cycle of dieting before summer—when more skin is exposed—to the masochistic aspects of old religions. This practice is present in many religions and is usually associated with spiritual fortitude: overcoming the weakness of the flesh by punishing it. Religions and belief systems in which the spirit overcomes the flesh are also present outside the West. As a result, Wolf’s connection between this particular masochistic aspect of the beauty myth and religion is more universal.

“For women to be urged to think continually of beauty’s fragility and transience is a way to try to keep us subservient, by maintaining in us a fatalism that has not been part of Western men’s thinking since the Renaissance. Taught that God or nature does or does not bestow ‘beauty’ on them—randomly, beyond appeal—we live in a world in which magic, prayer, and superstition make sense.”

Some of Wolf’s parallels between religion and mass consumer culture pertain specifically to Christian symbolism. Others are more general, describing the realm of the irrational, supernatural, and superstitious. Here, she is outlining the relationship between magic, superstition, and commodified beauty.

“But the fear-of-fat aspect actually changes the way the brain works. Women caught in it are subjected to classic, long-established forms of thought control. The weight mania would indeed be trivial if a woman joined the cult voluntarily, and could leave it whenever she chose. But the mentality of weight control is frightening because it draws on techniques that addict the devotee to cult thinking, and distort her sense of reality.”

The author examines the way perpetual hunger from constant dieting—inspired by the beauty myth—changes the way a woman’s brain works. The targets of such deprivation become fixated on food, more emotional, and disinterested in other subjects. As a result, the woman is so preoccupied with this process that she is unable to examine it objectively and remove herself from the situation. The author compares this type of thought control to cults. She thoroughly examines the diet-and-exercise industry as part of the beauty myth in the “Hunger” chapter.

“In fact, the beauty myth hit women simultaneously with—and in backlash against—the second wave and its sexual revolution, to effect a widespread suppression of women’s true sexuality. Very nearly released by the spread of contraception, legal abortion, and the demise of the sexual double standard, that sexuality was quickly restrained once again by the new social forces of beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism, which arose to put the guilt, shame, and pain back into women’s experience of sex.”

The author discusses the contradictory time of the sexual revolution in the US, which featured the overturning of patriarchal social norms and the introduction of the contraceptive pill and reproductive rights. At the same time, mass consumer culture launched “beauty pornography” which was used to reestablish control over newly freed women by instilling them with guilt and shame.

“The imposition of beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism from the top down shows in obscenity legislation. We saw that the language of women’s naked bodies and women’s faces is censored. Censorship also applies to what kind of sexual imagery and information can circulate: Sexual violence against women is not obscene whereas female sexual curiosity is.”

Wolf highlights the double standards of beauty pornography as they pertain to the beauty myth. First, women’s sexual body parts are displayed in the media, whereas men’s body parts are censored. Second, the way women’s bodies are displayed in mass culture and advertisements is censored by adhering to a specific, airbrushed stereotype rather than a realistic depiction of women’s diverse bodies. Third, depictions of violence against women, including sexual assault, appear more and more frequently in ads, films, and on television. These depictions desensitize the viewer to violence targeting women, according to the author.

“Images that flatten sex into ‘beauty,’ and flatten the beauty into something inhuman, or subject her to eroticized torment, are politically and socioeconomically welcome, subverting female sexual pride and ensuring that men and women are unlikely to form common cause against the social order that feeds on their mutual antagonism, their separate versions of loneliness.”

The author believes that one of the goals of the beauty myth is to separate men and women and to pit them against each other rather than unite them in a common social struggle. Together, she argues, they would be a real threat and would, therefore, challenge the establishment. For this reason, beauty pornography engenders feelings of inadequacy in women and offers unrealistic expectations about heterosexual relationships for both men and women.

“Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market.”

Wolf argues that consumer culture reduces humans to two-dimensional stereotypes and target markets by exerting psychological pressure to keep them interested in their products. The impact of consumer culture damages authentic identities and real human relationships.

“In the past, women felt vulnerable, in the prenuptial bed, to pregnancy, illegal abortion, and abandonment. Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe.”

The author contrasts the more tangible forms of past social and political control to the psychological control of late 20th-century capitalist mass culture. Herein lies the difference between the first, second, and third waves of Western feminism. The first and second waves of feminism struggled to gain basic labor, economic, and political rights. The third wave of feminism—while addressing institutional discrimination that remains—also focused on culture, language, and psychology.

“The thin “ideal” is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution.”

Wolf suggests that the lucrative diet-and-exercise industry arose as part of the beauty myth at a time when women reached their greatest degree of social freedom. The excessively thin, unhealthy ideal is one of the methods used to control women as it keeps them feeling inadequate for not measuring up, ashamed of breaking their perpetual diets, and distracted by their constant fixation on food. The physiological effects of always being hungry, or even semistarvation, include emotional imbalance and fatigue. These consequences of hunger are then used to chastise women as if these are innate “female” qualities rather than the results of being pressured to make unhealthy choices.

“Adolescent starvation was, for me, a prolonged reluctance to be born into woman if that meant assuming a station of beauty.”

The author delves into her personal experience with fluctuating weight and hunger to stay thin when she was in high school. Retelling a personal anecdote makes her appear more vulnerable and relatable to the reader. Here, she links womanhood with shapeliness contrary to the unhealthily thin ideal of the beauty myth.

“The myth of female frailty, and the very real cult of female hypochondria that seemed to support the myth, played directly into the financial interests of the medical profession,” according to Ehrenreich and English.”

In the “Violence” chapter, the author examines elective cosmetic surgery as the practice is rooted in the beauty myth. She finds many historic parallels, especially between the Victorian period and the 1990s. One such parallel is the financial motivation behind elective, women-specific surgeries. If the Victorian era was obsessed with suppressing female sexuality, then the late 20th century focused on hunger and pain in the pursuit of beauty. In both cases, the emotional side-effects from societal pressures, such as hysteria or hypochondria, were viewed as inherently “female” traits rather than the result of social conditioning.

“Recall the reclassification process and how it moves, once violence begins, from narrow to wide: The Nazi doctors began by sterilizing people with chronic disabilities, then with minor defects, then ‘undesirables’; finally, healthy Jewish children were placed in the net because their Jewishness was disease enough. The definition of sick, expendable life soon became ‘loose, extensive, and increasingly known.’ The ‘useless eaters’ were simply put on a ‘fat-free diet’ until they starved to death; they had ‘already been fed sufficiently and the idea of not nourishing them was in the air.’ Remember the characterization of parts of women as already wounded, numb, deformed, or dead. ‘These people,’ the Nazi doctors declared of ‘undesirables,’ ‘are already dead.’”

This quotation is one of the more provocative statements in this book. Wolf traces the types of semistarvation diets that women undertake to historic eugenic movements. The darkest historic example she uses is the Third Reich when the medical profession separated people into “desirable” human specimens—healthy, ethnic Germans—and the undesirable Untermenschen who did not fit the racial, ethnic, ideological, or health requirements. Wolf believes that the beauty myth and the medical experiments performed by Nazi Germany are part of the same trajectory. This comparison inspires shock, and the author could have been clearer in separating these examples.

“Technology will continue radically to destabilize the social value of the female body. Products are being developed to predetermine sex, with success rates of 70—80 percent; when such products are available one can expect, based on gender preferences recorded worldwide, that the ratio of women to men will drop precipitously.”

The author predicts the types of eugenic, patriarchal ideas she sees lurking in the future. She believes that technology may be used for nefarious purposes such as selecting embryos that will become male. This is an extreme scenario. However, in the 21st century, certain fertility clinics advertise the ability to select a future child’s eye color. In this sense, Wolf was generally accurate in her prediction about the attempts to surpass nature by using eugenic methods.

“The irony is that more beauty promises what only more female solidarity can deliver: The beauty myth can be defeated for good only through an electric resurgence of the woman-centered political activism of the seventies—a feminist third wave—updated to take on the new issues of the nineties.”

The author concludes that women must challenge the beauty myth’s harm, but it cannot be challenged by individuals: Women must act in solidarity and work as a group. She believes that only the type of activism that existed during the second wave of feminism would work in this regard. Whereas women recognizing themselves as a group with political goals would be a positive development, Wolf’s conclusion is partly the result of her insufficient criticism of the capitalist system that produces the beauty myth. She views activism and demonstrations as the only ways to dismantle the myth, rather than making fundamental changes to the very system that spawned it.