The Beauty Myth

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1990

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Comparing First, Second, and Third Waves of Feminism

One of the recurrent themes in The Beauty Myth is the relationship between the first, second, and third waves of feminism in the West. Wolf uses a comparative framework to document the types of rights that were obtained during each movement. Her goal as one of the leaders of the third wave is to underscore the challenges still facing women in the late 20th century.

The first wave of feminism was a loose movement in the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. Early feminists focused on basic legal rights and protections under the law, such as property ownership and women’s right to vote. The term “feminism” is usually attributed to the French, 19th-century socialist thinker, Charles Fourier. He was critical of what he perceived as the marital oppression of women.

Women’s suffrage expanded in the mid-19th century with certain countries like Australia and the UK granting women the right to vote in local elections. This movement was paralleled by greater access to post-secondary education for women in parts of the West. By the 1920s, several countries granted voting rights to women; in the US, this right came from the 19th Amendment of 1920. Across the world, voting rights were accompanied by other victories ranging from legalized divorce to serving as witnesses in Court. Some socialist countries, like the Soviet Union, were the first to legalize abortion.

Second-wave feminism arose in the US and the West in the 1960s and lasted until the late 1980s. This movement continued women’s advancement in the legal realm but also focused on political, economic, social, and professional power. Wolf defers to some of the best-known feminists throughout this text, including Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. Their movement coincided with the 1960s sexual revolution and the creation of the contraceptive pill. In 1972, the US introduced Title IX of the Education Amendments which prohibited gender-based discrimination in education. By the mid-1970s, the US and many Western countries saw abortion legalized.

The third wave of feminism arose in the 1990s and lasted for approximately two decades. Using its predecessors as a starting point, this movement focused on culture, society, representation, body positivity as well as intersectionality. Some aspects of the third feminist wave were influenced by postmodernism, specifically dismantling grand narratives in favor of culturally specific frameworks or individuality. After publishing The Beauty Myth, Wolf was hailed as one of the key spokespeople of this movement. As a third-wave feminist, Wolf examined women’s representation in culture, society, and mass media, as well as human psychology, in every chapter of this book. However, she always returned to the need to codify tangible rights into law. She listed numerous problems facing women, ranging from institutional discrimination in the “Work” chapter to the troubling statistics on sexual assault and intimate-partner violence, in the “Sex” chapter.

Furthermore, because Wolf found historic links between late 20th-century beauty ideology and Victorian, medieval, or even earlier precedents, she believed herself to be challenging the same patriarchal opponent as the first and second waves, rebranded in a new form. For example, Wolf’s chapter on religion in the Beauty Myth sought to demonstrate the way patriarchal aspects of old faiths came to be incorporated into the late 20th-century beauty ideology. This occurred in a variety of ways, from references to religious paintings in product advertising to internalizing the idea that beauty is pain (as linked to Eve’s fall). For this reason, analyzing women’s issues in a comparative framework and learning from the past is an essential step for making progress.

Religious Imagery in Consumer Advertising

Wolf locates the beauty myth within the mass culture of capitalism, specifically consumer advertising. The beauty myth defines the relationship between a woman’s looks and her value and identity as a human being and an individual. However, Wolf argues, the beauty myth is just the latest iteration of the attempts to control women after they gained basic labor, political, and social rights in the 20th century. This attempt is more insidious because it preys on human psychology and social pressure rather than relying upon direct, political means.

To establish the context, Wolf traces the previous attempts to control women to historically patriarchal structures in the West such as institutionalized religion. She reviews the history of Christianity from a feminist perspective. For example, she reminds the reader that Eve was created from Adam’s rib: “Second-rate, woman-born, the female body is always in need of competition, of man-made ways to perfect it” (94). In a traditional society, women were often excluded from the religious hierarchy, property ownership, and political decision-making. However, the concept of original sin pertains to both men and women simply by descending from Adam, the first human, who fell in the Garden of Eden. Wolf argues that the modern context of consumer mass culture thus redefines “original sin as being born not mortal, but female” (95).

Considering the long history of Christianity, the author believes its themes are important even to a nominally secular society. Even if someone isn’t religious, “religious dogma, using some of the mind-altering techniques of older cults and sects, arose around age and weight to functionally supplant traditional ritual” (11). Wolf asserts that the viewer responds to religious imagery on a subconscious level. For this reason, advertisers often resort to using visual or linguistic references to religion. They choose certain techniques, such as composition and lighting, from famous religious paintings. They also use religious language to advertise products, such as “miracle cures.”

As early as the 1920s, consumer advertising used photography because it offered the perception of being documentary and realistic while enhancing the qualities of a given product. One style of advertising depicted a happy, nuclear family gathered around a given household product, such as a new appliance, which was lit like a religious figure in Renaissance and Baroque paintings. Wolf underscores the “use of light metaphor for divinity” (103). She points out that many cosmetic and skincare products are depicted in a similar way to appear more desirable. Furthermore, the product itself, such as a skin cream, becomes “the ‘holy oil’ of the new religion” (103).

The author locates many other parallels between religious concepts and consumer culture as it perpetuates the beauty myth. Because women are always considered imperfect no matter how conventionally beautiful they may look, it is the cosmetic surgeon that is worshipped like a god. After all, cosmetic surgery may bring one closer and closer to unattainable perfection.

Even though mass consumer culture is intrinsic to capitalism and modernity, Wolf believes that this religious undercurrent with direct art history references affects the intended viewer on a deeper level, even in a secular society. She argues that the results of this imagery lead to a variety of psychological issues. They range from simply feeling like one does not measure up to more serious ailments like anorexia and bulimia.

The Cult of Youth in Consumer Advertisements

One key argument in The Beauty Myth focuses on the way the old forms of control were refurbished as women gained more freedoms in the latter part of the 20th century. These new forms of control link commodified beauty and a woman’s value, and they work psychologically rather than through brute force. Most women are coerced into replicating beauty ideology to avoid feelings of guilt and shame over not measuring up to the cookie-cutter, Iron Maiden ideal.

One of the most important aspects of this beauty ideology is perpetual youth. The obsession with youth, or at least youthfulness, entered mass culture through consumer advertising in the first decades of the 20th century. If the Victorian era was considered sexually repressed and excessive cosmetics would have been seen as a sign of immorality, then 1920s mass culture represented quite the change. For example, 1920s hair color company Brownatone scared women about going gray; their ads read “Refuse to become gray or even gray streaked” and “Your hair has renewed its youthful beauty” (“Brownatone advertising” (April 1926) Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan, vol. 80., International Magazine Publishing Company, 1925-1926, 172). Decades later, a 2022 skincare line is called Youth To The People, mimicking the labor slogan “power to the people” to sell beauty products.

In the early 20th century, youth was associated with health, beauty, and greater leisure time thanks to the development of time-saving household appliances. Wolf writes that this decade was also the first time that thinness and dieting entered consumer advertising and mass culture, associated with the fast pace of the urban lifestyle, flappers, and nightlife.

Instead of portraying aging as just another part of the lifecycle, the youth cult makes aging seem abnormal. For many women, aging is associated with transforming from mothers to grandmothers. In the past, these life changes came with ancestral wisdom and reverence for the older members of one’s family and one’s community. The youth cult inverts this concept in a perpetual search for a fountain of youth. Wolf describes the anti-aging industry, like the diet-and-exercise industry, as having failure as a feature rather than a glitch. After all, everyone gets older, and biological processes cannot be stopped. For this reason, the anti-aging industry, from topical creams to elective cosmetic surgery, is so lucrative, even as some anti-aging techniques come with varied results and risk factors.

The youth cult is also part of the Iron Maiden mold used to shape women into cookie-cutter versions of the commodified beauty myth. Wolf describes this phenomenon as a generic kind of aesthetics rather than a true beauty rooted in individuality. After all, as a woman ages, she wears some of her life experiences and resilience on her body, from laugh lines to scars and signs of childbirth. The author also underscores the way aging is marketed differently, in a gendered way, to men and women. Men gradually get silver hair and look dignified as they age while, according to the beauty myth, women simply turn old. Wolf believes that in addition to control, the question of aging is also a distraction from real-life struggles: “Almost all working women are clustered in twenty low-status job categories; we do have an “invisible enemy”—institutional discrimination” (115).

Of course, in the 21st century, more and more companies turn to body positivity and more realistic portrayals of women to sell products. It is no longer unusual to see women in their 50s and 60s in consumer advertising and on social media. In some cases, their images are less edited and appear closer to reality, such as in Dove’s pro-age campaign. However, Dove is owned by the Unilever corporation, which also owns such brands as Axe Body Spray which is known for its somewhat humorous ads of women chasing after conventionally good-looking men because they smell good. With this, even attempts at more inclusive representation are commodified and respond to the perceived needs of specific target markets rather than truly authentic portrayals of individuals.