A key point for understanding what Naomi Wolf really means—broadly speaking—by the “The Beauty Myth” arrives very early in the text.
“Recent research consistently shows that inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret `underlife’ poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty it is a dark vein of self-hatred physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control.”
What Wolf means when she refers to “poison” is a toxicity that runs throughout western society capable of infecting the hardest of the hard-line feminists. A poisonous substance that drives multiple industries and becomes a partial aspect underlining the success of others. Wolf pulls back the curtain on the opposition to reveal that the big muscle behind the subjugation of woman as mere sex objects and creatures of beauty to be seen, but not heard is dependent on weaker tendons in the form of a quest to meet the mythical ideal of beauty. Femininity ultimately remains equated with beauty, not brains; with looking smart rather than being smart. The ironic paradox of this quest to have fuller lips, high cheeks, clearer skin, lusher hair and all the other attributes associated with the mythical ideal is that it is an ideal that has been and continues to be constructed by men.
Subjugation to this mythic ideal results in exploitation of the marketplace that exists specifically for the purpose of exploitation of women’s worst feelings and doubts about themselves as they relate to the spectrum of this idealism of attractiveness. Wolf brilliantly points out one of the most negative consequences of this pursuit of physical perfection is directly attributable to the difficulty women have in rising within the business world. While men—not held hostage to a beauty myth of their own—are free to spend time in pursuit of success, women are spending that time applying makeup, getting beauty treatments, having their nails done, visiting hair stylists or—at the extreme end of things—undergoing surgery to “augment” their chances of attaining perfection. When one considers things in this light and really thinks about how many advantages men are taking with their time while women are pursuing the myth, the advantage for men of creating the beauty myth and sustaining it becomes astonishing clear.
The most tragic aspect of the beauty myth is its psychological effect. By definition, the creation of an ideology in which perfection is attainable in theory means that imperfection is rampant. That awareness does not operate in an emotional vacuum. With this in mind, the real business model behind the “Beauty Myth” seems to be not creating a path toward attaining an ideal, but purposely engendering self-doubt, self-loathing and unnecessarily lowering self-esteem. Socio-historical paradigm shifts have only served to intensify this business model.
The shift from the dominant role for woman as homemaker to becoming an equal partner in the world of work outside the home has created new external pressures to pursue that idealistic model of femininity. From needing to look “pretty” to please just one man, American women in the workplace found themselves needing to be attractive to an endless parade of symbolic husband-substitutes. The feminist movement which succeeded in giving women greater opportunities outside the home has ironically fostered an even greater need to become attractive to an even greater number of men.
The ultimate irony, however, is also reserved for the feminist movement. Wolf reveals an ugly truth about the true strength of beauty myth holds over women. The beauty industry and every other industry have colluded to create another myth that is in competition with the result being that even many women with otherwise high self-esteem who have evaded the pressures of doubt and self-loathing still must inevitably give into the external pressure to make sure they don’t “look” like a feminist because only those women not attractive enough to chase the ideal are satisfied with not caring about how they look. That is, after all, why they become feminists in the first place. (So goes the propaganda, anyway.)
Much of what Wolf argues is purely theoretical, of course, but as the above assertion reveals quite starkly, few things in modern society are uglier than the beauty myth.
