The Beauty Myth

In ‘The Beauty Myth’, Naomi Wolf describes how nowadays women are specially tormented by personal and physical beauty, and the beauty ideals created by men as a way to expend women’s power, weakening them not only physically, but psychologically and emotionally. The Beauty Myth is social control, and a modern backlash against feminism, in which female beauty act as ‘political weapons against women’s advancement’. The ideas presented in Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’ can be closely related and compared to those exposed in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, dystopian novel written by Margaret Atwood.

Our present Beauty Myth is based completely on aesthetics and women’s beauty. A successful professional career, family, and emotional balance, are not enough compared to the power that beauty might bring. As Wolf states in this passage, “Thirty three thousand American women would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal”. Regardless how trivial these concerns might seem and how much they matter, they are destroying women’s freedom and control. Women are tormented by their physical appearance. Wolf describes beauty as a quality that “women must want to embody, and men must want women to embody”. Although women had gained what they were struggling for; legal and reproductive rights, higher education, profession and opportunities, and a social role, consumerism and advertisement made beauty a “currency system”, creating a certain ideal to it that women desire to achieve. During the past decade, eating disorders raised, cosmetic surgery increased and markets that were as influential as they used to, become extremely powerful, becoming able to manipulate their consumers. Once women were stronger materially and more powerful, society aimed to weaken them psychologically.

Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, describes a similar setting, in which women living in the totalitarian state of Gilead are controlled by men with the sole purpose of providing the ‘divine womb’. It is interesting to see how Naomi Wolf also describes this as once being part of the ‘Beauty Myth’; religions that dominated the Mediterranean from 25000 B.C.E to about 700 B.C.E, Goddesses such as Ishtar, Venus, Cybele and Isis would only serve for the ‘divine womb’.

When reading this passage, one can identify similar ideas from Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. As Naomi Wolf claims that in our society, men impose their own rules and ideals in order for them to take most of the power, leaving women as an inferior being. In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, the state of Gilead is doing exactly the same. In Gilead, men have created and imposed the different roles in society, the handmaids, Marthas, Wives, and Econowives, in order to break women apart. It is very explicit in ‘The Handmaids Tale’ that these social rules have torn women into very distinctive and opposing groups, where they hate each other mutually, thus resulting in them never getting together to form a greater power, but leaving them with a lack of not only power, but freedom. This manipulation of the psyche is key as a way to maintain and even increase power.

Another idea that struck me while reading ‘The Beauty Myth’ is how men try to undermine women’s power in society by creating harmless ways to express their creativity and passion. Take needlepoint and lace making as examples; these Victorian inventions were made in order to keep women occupied from doing anything else. In ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, it is this kind of activities that are allowed for women to perform, showing once again how men are constantly trying to take control of our society.