Book: The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf

The Beauty Myth, How images of beauty are used against women

• We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution.
• The contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable.
• Feminists, inspired by Frieden, broke the stranglehold on the women's popular press of advertisers for household products, who were promoting the feminine mystique; at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women's intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful women-hood.
• The sexual revolution promoted the discovery of female sexuality; beauty pornography - which for the first time in women's history artificially links a commodified "beauty" directly and explicitly to sexuality - invaded the mainstream to undermine women's new and vulnerable sense of sexual-self worth.
• "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. 
• If the beauty myth is not based on evolution, sex, gender, aesthetics or God, on what is it based? It claims to be about intimacy and sex and life, a celebration of women. It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance and sexual repression. 
• The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power. 
• The myth flourishes when material constraints on women are dangerously loosened. Before the Industrial Revolution, the average women could not have had the same feelings about "beauty" that modern women do who experience the myth as continual comparison to a mass disseminated physical ideal. 
• Fashion is always influenced by Western world ideals.
• Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An ideology that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. 
• Costello wrote, advertisements "attempted to preserve the socially acceptable feminine image of women war workers." A Pond's cold cream ad of the time read: "We like to feel we look feminine even though we are doing a man-sized job...so we tuck flowers and ribbons in our hair and try to keep our faces looking pretty as you please."
• "In psychological terms," writes Ann Oakley in Housewife, "they enabled the harassed mother, the overburdened housewife, to make contact with her ideal self: the self which aspires to be a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient home-maker...Women's expected role in society (was) to strive after perfection in all three roles. 
• The women's movement nearly succeeded in toppling the economics of the magazines' version of femininity. During its second wave, clothing manufacturers were alarmed to find that women weren't spending much money on clothing anymore. As middle-class women abandoned their role as consuming housewives and entered the workforce , their engagement with the issues of the outer world could foreseeably lead them to lose interest altogether in women's magazines' separate feminine reality. 
• Women's sense of liberation from the older constraints of fashion was countered by a new and sinister relationship to their bodies, Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles. 
• In the crossover of imagery in the 1980s, the conventions of high-class pornographic photography, such as Playboy's, began to be used generally to sell products to women. This made the beauty thinking that followed crucially different from all that preceded it. 
• Seeing a face anticipating orgasm, even if it is staged, is a powerful sell: In the absence of other sexual images, many women came to believe that they must have that face, that body, to achieve that ecstasy.
• To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual - and hence social - confidence while undermining that of women. 
• "Femininity" is code for femaleness plus whatever a society happens to be selling. If "femininity" means female sexuality and its loveliness, women never lost it and do not need to buy it back. 
• To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality: Studies consistently show that dietary deprivation, sexual interests dissipate.
• Young women inherited twenty years of the propagandising caricature of the ugly feminist, so I'm feminine, not a feminist. 
• The pressure of beauty pornography and the pressures of achievement combine to strike young women where they are most vulnerable: in their exploration of their sexuality in relation to their own sense of their own worth. 
• The terrible truth is that though the marketplace promotes the myth, it would be powerless if women didn't enforce it against one another. For any one woman to outgrow the myth, she needs the support of many women. The toughest but most necessary change will come not from men or from the media, but from women, in the way we see and behave toward other women.