THE BEAUTY MYTH: WOMEN'S TOUGHTEST STRUGGLE.

BASED ON THE BOOK; THE BEAUTY MYTH BY NAOMI WOLF

During the past decade, women breached the power structure; more women have more money, power, scope and legal recognition than they ever had before; but in terms of how they feel about themselves physically may actually be worse off than their grandmothers’ minds.

Many are ashamed to admit that such trivial concerns - to do with physical appearances, bodies, faces, hair, clothes - matter so much. Women are wondering if it isn’t that they are entirely neurotic and alone but rather that something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty.

We are in the midst of violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth.

The unpleasant image of feminist today resembles less the feminist themselves than the image fostered by the interests of whom opposed to vote for women. That resurrected caricature, which sought to punish women for their public acts by going after their private sense of life, became the paradigm for new limits placed on aspiring women everywhere.

As women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground, expanding as it wanted to carry on its work of social control. As soon as a woman’s primarily social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty.

It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.

The beauty myth tells a story:

The quality called ‘beauty” objectively and universally exists. Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it.

"Strong" men battle for beautiful women, and beautiful women are more reproductively successful. None of this is true. “Beauty” is a currency system like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age it’s the belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

But what beauty myth is based on? It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression. The beauty myth is not about women at al, it’s about men’s institutions and institutional power. It is always actually prescribing behavior - which is essential for economic reasons - and not appearence - turning behavior into social virtue.

Aging women is “unbeautiful” since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken; it is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominance institutions threatened by women’s freedom.

The rise of the beauty was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminie sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. By using ideas about “beauty”, it reconstructed an alternative female world with its own laws, economy, religion, education, and culture, each element as repressive as any that had gone before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal.

Women can best be weakened psychologically now that they are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. Competition between women also has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. 

The mass depiction of the modern woman as a “beauty” is a contradiction: where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, “beauty” is by definition inert, timeless and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way “beauty” so directly women’s real situation.

The collision is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repacking its meaning in an acceptable format and the costs of these social blind spots are destructive communal illusions. The resulting hallucination materializes, for women, as something all too real. No longer just an idea, it incorporated with itself how women live and how they do not live.

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, their faces, bodies and voices and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced “beautiful” images? Due to an ideology that makes women feel “worth less” was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make them feel worth more.

The concept of women as naturally trapped within the Feminie Mystique has been forced on them by popular sociology, by magazines, and fiction to disguise the fact that woman in her role of consumer has been essential to the development of our society.

The myth is undermining - slowly, imperceptibly, without them being aware of the real forces of erosion - the ground women have gained through long, hard, honorable struggle.

The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting them psychologically. If they free themselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaless, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.