Update this section You can help us out by revising, improving and updating this section. Today, many women still support Wolf's ideas, and equality in the workplace and ridding societal norms is becoming more common. The workplace nurtures and sustains the beauty myth. The Beauty Myth is a book that not only gives the background of a discrimination problem, but also calls for a solution. In the next blink, we’ll see how this myth plays out in the workplace. And since images and standards of beauty change, the identity of women is constantly vulnerable and in need of external validation. This is what the beauty myth does: it keeps women trapped, self-destructively competing with themselves and each other. To maintain the patriarchy, a new, subtler and more deceptive method for undermining women’s freedom and power was needed.

With industrialization came increasing freedom for women. Their lives took shape around attributes like work aptitude, physical strength and fertility – not beauty. The beauty myth is the final mechanism of cultural ideology with the power to control women, women who have otherwise been liberated to freely pursue their desires.īefore the Industrial Revolution, the social value of women was measured largely by their work within the domestic sphere. If anything, women with more power and status are scrutinized more and the pressure to look beautiful only gets worse. Even with all their achievements and success, the pressure to look good doesn’t cease. For instance, that beauty is an inherently good and beneficial quality and that, without it, women are worthless and invisible.Ĭonsider women who are at the top of their professions. The beauty myth claims that there is an elusive quality called “beauty” – a quality that women should do everything in their power to pursue, achieve and maintain. These images are being used with growing efficiency to work against the progress women have made, creating what is known as a beauty myth. But even though women have gained legal and reproductive rights, as well as more freedom to pursue higher education and enter previously male-dominated professions, there has also been some backlash.Īs women have made legal and economic strides over the past 50 years, we’ve also seen an increase in detrimental portrayals of female beauty. The women’s rights movement has made significant progress in the past few decades.

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf