Summary of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more they seem to feel pressured to look a certain way. Many women feel that their collective progress has stalled.

#2 The backlash against the ideology of beauty is so violent because it is the last 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.

#3 The beauty myth is a story that states that beauty objectively and universally exists. 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.

#4 The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power. The qualities that a given period considers beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable.