It's more starlets and Hollywood." Wolf attributes the change to "the democratisation of the luxury industry. "When I wrote the book, fashion models were the thing, but now fashion models don't seem to be that important in terms of the beauty myth. Meanwhile, you only need to glance at the spread of glossy magazines in your local newsagent - with every cover model an airbrushed echo of the woman who originally posed for the picture - to see that the beauty ideal has become narrower. Understanding that the images they see are manipulated by technology and that the messages they hear are designed to make them buy stuff hasn't lessened women's desire to conform to those images. Yet despite the cultural shift, the beauty industry has continued to grow. We have girl scouts learning to question the ideal of beauty and Hollywood stars giving interviews about loving your body." The assumption was that there must be something wrong with you: you don't measure up, you're a dissatisfied shrew. "When I wrote The Beauty Myth, it was considered almost taboo to question the ideal. Which is not to say that the issues today are exactly the same indeed, rereading the book in 2010, it's fascinating to note how much has changed - for better and worse.įor starters, much of what was revelatory to me back in the day would be eye-rollingly obvious to today's media-savvy teenagers. There's a similar "energy out there" right now, if the spate of books, articles, grassroots campaigns and political rhetoric about the relationship between the media, body image and sexualisation of girls is any indication. One person or three people might be the first to put it together, but the energy was out there anyway." I think there are some ideas that are part of the collective consciousness. "All the young women I knew were grappling with these issues very profoundly. "I had an instinct or intuition that it would," she says. Did she have any idea while she was writing it that it would resonate the way that it did? It must be odd, though, to have people from around the world wanting to talk about a book you wrote 20 years ago. When I gush my apologies for being so unoriginal, she concedes that she does hear this a lot, but adds that, "It never gets old. Embarrassingly, it's a phrase I can't stop myself from blurting to Wolf moments after we first speak. "That book changed my life," I'm told, again and again.
Still, when I mention her name to friends and colleagues, it's The Beauty Myth they want to talk about. She also worked as a women's issues consultant on two presidential campaigns (Clinton in 1996 Gore in 2000), co-founded The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership and helped establish The American Freedom Campaign.
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Over the next two decades, Wolf's books on female power ( Fire with Fire), sex ( Promiscuities) and motherhood ( Misconceptions) and her widely published articles on all of the above - plus pornography, abortion and sexual harassment - showed her continued knack for distilling the big issues for women. The Beauty Myth, first published in 1990, was an international bestseller The New York Times called it one of the most important books of the 20th century.
Naomi Wolf explains the evolution of sexism. If it doesn’t get the two of you to talking on a level you may not normally visit, read it again.The Beauty Myth 20 years on.
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Wolf compares the phrase, “Be a man,” which means be brave, be strong, and buck up, to “Be a woman,” which is code for “take off your clothes.” In one brilliantly explored section, she traces the history of the clitoris, starting with a Venetian scientist in 1559 who called it “preeminently the seat of women’s delight.” (Even so, the scientist - a man - had to go on to compare it to a “male member.”)īuy this book, read it, and then pass it on to your best girlfriend. She is at her strongest when she compares a girl’s upbringing with that of a boy. Traveling through the stages of adolescence, Wolf asks, anguished, “What, then, makes a woman? Who gets to decide? We were sophomores and juniors in our world now, and we were going mad in the effort to find out.” And what she wants us to understand is: “There are no good girls, we are all bad girls in the best sense of the word.” We are, writes Wolf, doing a grave disservice to our girls and, by extension, our boys as well. We are doing far more than just avoiding the topic of sex. We are still launching our girls onto the sea of womanhood with nary a raft to hang onto. Wolf has written this very personal book for entirely public reasons.
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