“The Beauty Myth” Revisited
About thirty years after Betty Friedan published her bestselling feminist manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, Naomi Wolf charged fashion magazines, or “beauty pornography” as she called them, with perpetuating “The Beauty Myth.” This myth, according to Wolf, sold women the lie that to be valuable to society was to be beautiful, and that unattainable standards of beauty are precisely what we see – dewy lipped and eyes half closed – on the pages of a magazine. For Wolf, this myth has lead to a variety of societal ills from hunger (anorexia and bulimia) to sustained violence against women on all fronts.