Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth takes on the backlash against the women's movement which is embodied in the view of women as possessing worth in direct ratio to their possession of beauty. It is an urgent, angry book and the subject merits the urgency and the anger. But it is also a poorly written book in many respects and Wolf often does her subject a great disservice. Any reader who is already as angry about the subject as Wolf will simply have her/his ideas confirmed. That audience already understands Wolf's basic premises and, while there is much to be learned here even for those most interested in the subject, she is essentially preaching to an already converted audience. But there are also a great number of potential readers who do not engage in the same analytic and critical processes that Wolf and her already-converted audience use to arrive at these conclusions. This possible audience is either willing to learn or is suspicious--but curious--and needs to be included if the book is going to do more than re-convince everyone who has already thought, known, assumed, discussed, or acted upon information and ideas of the type found in the book. While Wolf's barrage of examples usually provide overwhelming confirmation for the already-convinced, she provides no means of access for the unprepared. In many ways this is the kind of class and in-group bias that has often been a problem for feminism. The assumption that one's reader shares one's experiences, body of knowledge, critical approach, and educational background is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The book is written in a popular style (but with notes for documentation) and this is good. Wolf's subject is so important that her ideas should be made available to the widest possible audience. She does not sensationalize the topic in terms of the critical inferences she draws or the magnitude she assigns to the problem. But she fails to achieve a tone that is a reasonable b...