The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women

According to Amazon.com, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women is the bestselling classic that redefined the view of the relationship between beauty and female identity.Based on the description of the book, in today’s world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women’s movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which she argues, may just prove as restrictive as the traditional image of the homemaker and wife. It’s the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society’s impossible definition of “the flawless beauty”.The critics of the book such as Christina Hoff Sommers disagreed with Wolf about the claim that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia.Naomi Wolf is an American author and former political consultant. With the publication of The Beauty Myth which became a best seller in 1991, she became a leading spokesperson of what was later described as the third wave of the feminist movement.