The Beauty Myth in The Guilty Feminist Podcast Reading List

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Aug 30, 2015 Kerri rated it liked it · review of another edition

" The Beauty Myth is The Feminine Mystique for the 80s"... and the 90s, and the 00s, and the 10s. I was sitting around months ago and thought, quite brilliantly, to myself: "Huh. I think standards of female beauty have gotten higher and higher (i.e. more and more unattainable for the average woman) as our "freedoms" in every other arena have increased.
So there, Naomi Wolf!

All of the reviews on here on this book perfectly encapsulated how I felt about reading it.

The beauty myth, as I interpreted " The Beauty Myth is The Feminine Mystique for the 80s"... and the 90s, and the 00s, and the 10s. I was sitting around months ago and thought, quite brilliantly, to myself: "Huh. I think standards of female beauty have gotten higher and higher (i.e. more and more unattainable for the average woman) as our "freedoms" in every other arena have increased.
So there, Naomi Wolf!

All of the reviews on here on this book perfectly encapsulated how I felt about reading it.

The beauty myth, as I interpreted what Wolf was trying to describe, is the summation and result of various social, economic, political, and personal factors that keep women focused on their appearance, so that they are unable to meet their full potential as human beings. Rather, significant percentages of their mental, physical, and temporal capacities are spent (some might say wasted) dieting, shopping, waxing, exercising, coloring, make-up-ing, dressing, liposuctioning, etc - when they could be winning Nobel prizes. Concurrently, others/all judge women by their appearances (consciously or subconsciously) so that if a woman does NOT make the effort to try a meet the current beauty standard, she has failed as a woman before she has the chance to succeed as a human being. There is no way to fight the beauty myth, no way to win. You can conform, and eke out such success as you can earn when you have two or three times as much "work" to do to your face and body before you can leave the house in the morning than your male counterparts. Or you can refuse to acquiesce to the current beauty standard and be judged "ugly" and unfit for society.

It is eerie that this book, written twenty-four years ago, still rings true. When I read The Feminine Mystique in high school, I recognized the significance of the expose without any fear or empathy. I knew unequivocally then that I would not ever be faced with the non-choice offered to women in the 50s and bookend decades. But this! The beauty myth! I am living the beauty myth. Every time I am late for a meeting and have to decide whether to switch out my skirt for pants or shave my legs in the sink. Every time I brace myself to wear flats to a fancy meeting or bar instead of heels - because tendinitis doesn't seem enough of a reason to not make myself 3" taller with a shapelier ass. Every time I bring pepper spray on a run, in case my heat-appropriate exercise-wear makes some man think I'm "asking for it." When my coworker tells me I have to stop wearing tank tops to work - not because they're unsafe, but because I might "distract" the construction workers. (And for that matter, every time I struggled to wear "appropriate" clothing in high school, with breasts twice as large as most of my female classmates. What I was wearing did not matter nearly as much as how it looked on me.)

The point of that rant is, Wolf did not need to convince me that the beauty myth exists. But, if she was trying to convince me, she might have failed. Why were there no footnotes? In one chapter she began describing advertisements showing violence against women - I tried to find what she was talking about and, while the ones provided to me by Google were definitely what she was describing, they also... weren't. She used the most extreme language that might fit the image to shock. She compared (voluntary!) plastic surgery with Nazi experiments. She (probably? couldn't tell, not sure of her sources) overstated the prevalence of anorexia and bulimia without discussing bingeing, the food economy, or obesity. And, while towards the end I was pretty comfortable with her blaming capitalism for the advertising that is at the heart of presenting the tenets of the "religion" of beauty upkeep, the first few chapters had me raising my eyebrows at "them." I don't believe in massive conspiracies to keep women down. I just believe in some sexist individuals, often in high positions, and then cultural patterns that work against women (AND other marginalized groups).

I can recall two instances of her referencing race in this book - one comparison of a hypothetical "lightening" cream for blacks and how that would be interpreted as racist, and the mention of plastic surgery for the eyes, specifically for those of Asian descent to look more western/white. Could/should have been more here.

On an optimistic note, as much as the Internet is a hotbed of sexist trolls, social media in particular is working probably more effectively than anything else could to dismantle the beauty myth. Women seeing women in their un-Photoshopped bodies and retailers responding to consumers' desires to have clothing and make-up marketed by diverse looking models. So capitalism could kind of reverse this all after all. ...more

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Jan 08, 2020 Laura rated it it was amazing

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Jan 07, 2019 Leanne marked it as to-read

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