Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth

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 knowl

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illance is used against political prisoners for similar reasons" and begins her next paragraph with "This ritual use of surveillance is a vivid example of the real motivation behind the myth" (99). Which "ritual use" is that? She offers no details about prisoner surveillance (and why "political" prisoners and not criminals?) and so the "ritual" must refer to the surveillance of women in asylums (all asylums? an asylum?). And surely the internal, driving voice of schizophrenic women is a poor example of the internalizing of the patriarchal imperative. After all, and this is an important point for Wolf when she remembers it, the voices of unknowingly coopted women--friends, mothers, teachers--are a major part of that endless stream that carries the patriarchal message to the individual woman. And surely schizophrenic men are driven by internal voices--which makes it seem highly suspect to assign the patriarchal imperative as the reason that male voices speak to schizophrenic women. On what points are men hectored by these voices if women are given a "running critique of appearance and performance"? Presumably Showalter's book explains in some detail how women in asylums are, while being observed, "taught" to "watch themselv

Category: Psychology - N