She calls this ideal the Iron Maiden, named after the Medieval torture device. They struggle with feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy by trying to live up to an impossible ideal. The author argues that many women ultimately subscribe to and perpetuate the myth to their own detriment. Indeed, the more legal rights women obtained in the late 19th and 20th centuries, the more the beauty myth was used to control them in indirect and insidious ways. Wolf, therefore, believes that masochistic dieting symbolically reflects women’s inferior role in the late 20th-century West. According to traditions across different cultures, the most valued community members received the most food. Similarly, she traces the lucrative diet-and-exercise industry, in which women are encouraged to be perpetually hungry and fixate on food, back to traditional ideas about food and social hierarchy. These chapters are “Work,” “Culture,” “Religion,” “Sex,” “Hunger,” “Violence,” and “Beyond the Beauty Myth.” Wolf analyzes the beauty myth within these specific contexts, as well as the way these contexts interplay and overlap to enforce patriarchal beauty standards for women.Įven though the beauty myth is primarily linked to modern consumerism, the author links it to patriarchal ideas from earlier historic periods such as the biblical creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. The following seven chapters analyze the way the beauty myth has spread in the West in the context of consumerism and mass culture, especially after the Industrial Revolution. The link between the beauty myth and “a long hard struggle for identity” is the main theme in this text (285). Wolf defines the beauty myth as a commodified, censored, and unreachable physical ideal to which women must adhere. The first chapter, “The Beauty Myth,” defines the book’s subject matter and some of its key themes ranging from religion to elective cosmetic surgery. This study guide refers to the 2009 HarperCollins eBook edition.Ĭontent Warning: This book references disordered eating and domestic violence.

Author of the beauty myth