Beauty Myth

This dissertation deals with, Femininity used as a political weapon in Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How images of female beauty are used against women. On the outside it appears as if the relationship between men and women have become on an equal plain and have developed.  But in reality there is a relationship that exists on a deeper level. A woman has become a tool that society uses to express its deeper needs.

The text, The Beauty Myth: How images of female beauty are used against women or better known as The Beauty Myth, proposes the idea of an Iron maiden which gives an idea of a superwoman, a standard that can be achieved by no human being, male or female. The major areas in which the book deals with is work, sex, religion, culture, violence and hunger. But Naomi Wolf goes on a deeper scale. Her focus is not on each area, but on how a women’s beauty is being exploited in each of them.

From the beginning of recorded history women have always focused only on the needs of men. They have been in various ways become an object of men’s fancy, and now their femininity is being used as a political weapon. Here women are viewed as being as mere bartering chips for the advancement of men. Women have lost their identity and have become living, faceless mannequins.    

The Beauty Myth, the debut book by Naomi Wolf is a text which provides a new voice to feminism. It studies the impact of the male dominated society upon women in a time and age where women are, escaping the old social bonds by shattering the shackles which bind them. She calls this form of bondage as the “last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women”. Her mother Deborah Goleman is a feminist author herself who wrote the book The Lesbian community. 

Born on November 12, 1962, Wolf showed interest in debate and forensics. She was a part of the Lowell High School’s regional debate tournament as a member of Lowell forensics society. She is an American author and served as a political consultant to former American president Bill Clinton in 1996. She was educated in Yale University from where she received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in the year 1984, followed by being a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford.   

Born in San Francisco, she grew up in a family of Jewish scholars. Her father was a poet and an academic expert in horror and her mother was an anthropologist. It was through their support that Wolf was able to develop as much as she has. She was brought up in San Francisco in the 1960’s and 70’s along with her brother. They were raised with full freedom to develop as an individual but still they were taught to understand that this doesn’t mean that they can abuse money, convention or social status. She is currently perusing her doctorate at Oxford University.    

        Serving as a member of a brain storming, her role as part of his committee was to help him reach female voters. She again served the same role in Al Gore’s committee as the same role, however this time she was unsuccessful in her attempt. She is a part of the post-feminism era, but most of us are not even sure of what the word post feminism even means. Whatever understanding exists of this has always been based on personal assumptions.

This is an accumulative development of actions starting with both the first and second wave of feminism. The first wave feminism is a movement which worked for the eliminations and reforms of women’s social and legal inequalities of the nineteenth century. The second wave of feminism is a term coined by Marsha Lear. It deals with activities surrounding feminism in America, Britain and other parts of Europe. It attacked programs such as beauty contests, however due to the fact that this was not a unified effort it failed.

According to the media the 1990’s has been named as the post feminist decade. What is known of post feminism is that it concerns with women gaining equal civil and political rights. This sector deals with understanding how women have made much advancement due to feminism, but it also explains about the original form of feminism is now inapplicable and in some ways is no longer desired. This is because the issues of women have changed so what was once needed is now unwanted.

Whenever we talk of post feminism we discuss issues surrounding responsibility, victimization and autonomy. The term originated in the year 1980, and is seen as a solution to the outdated feminist system which had been holding down women for decades. In the source text we see how women have been given and ideal image describing women, the only problem is that it is unattainable by any human being. The focus of the movement is to provide as a stage of transition from one of victim feminism to that of power feminism.

The Beauty Myth was not the only text written by Wolf. Following The Beauty Myth she published “Promiscuities: The secret struggle for womanhood”. Here she writes of texts which speak of male coming of age stories, such as those written by D.H. Lawrence, Ernest  Hemmingway, J.D. Salinger, and many others.. She now argues that such kind of texts which describe that of female sexuality is not available. Here she separates the fact from the fiction, to answer the question, what is female sexuality.  The aim of the text is not only the liberation of the female sexuality but to also create a deeper understanding of the desires which reside within an everyday woman. It clarifies all the conflicting messages directed at young women, and exposes a society terrified of a liberated woman.  

Her next book Misconceptions is actually a journal which was kept by Wolf during her first pregnancy. The book travels from her first ultrasound to the very delivery of the child. It is an attempt to understand all the doubts which a surround that of pregnancy and child birth in today’s world.  She seeks a more personal method to approach child birth. She gives suggestions of using methods such as that of midwifery. She regrets the fact that her first childbirth had to be a c- section. And the second half is that which surrounds life after childbirth and how it affects women and how it affects men. It focuses on the inequalities which exist between women regarding childcare.

A general conclusion cannot be drawn that all of Wolf’s books are feminist in nature. Her third book The End of America: Letter of warning to a young patriot. This text reveals the virtuosity of Wolf. Unlike her one of previous two books this text doesn’t deal with a feminist theme. It views the development of fascism, and outlines 10 steps that are needed for a fascist government to annihilate a nation’s democratic character; this was later made in to a documentary. She observes a pattern in the implementation of rule in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and more recently the style of political affairs applied in America since the terrorist attacks on September, 11th, 2001.