Wow, this book was amazing. I had a hard time getting into it at first, but as I got into it I couldn't put it down. More than 10 years later, I think the book is still very relevant and spot on. It details the ways women have been put down and trivialized by creating this desire to be beautiful, thin, and meet an ideal form of a woman that is basically unattainable. It also shows how this makes us do terrible things to ourselves (plastic surgery, anorexia, etc.), feel jealousy of other women, spend money on useless products, and, at the end of the day, still have low self esteem and make 75c on every dollar a man earns.

I'd be very interested in an update on this book, and especially how the author feels of Dove's alleged "campaign for real beauty." ( )

I really wasn't a fan of this. But it is informative just not for me. ( )

I agreed with many of the points she made, as well as much of the overall argument, but there are certainly points of the book that were a bit too extreme for me. ( )

The Beauty Myth is a good intro to women's studies and how women are trapped by conflicting expectations of their gender. Naomi Wolf argues that post-second wave feminism (the 1970s), women were put under greater pressure by gender expectations - because we still have to be beautiful and defer to men and have families as before, but now a career and independence and strength are expected too. We have built a society in which women are told to be both confident and submissive.

Wolf discusses our unattainably narrow standard of "beauty," which shames women into thinking that they're deficient and barely able, out of pity, to creep about in society. There are images of physical violence and self-loathing in advertisements, mainstream media, and pornography - created by men, internalized by women. One of the best statements that Wolf makes is "A misogynist culture has succeeded in making women hate what misogynists hate."

Wolf is careful to stress, both in the introduction and conclusion, that this book is not "anti-beauty." Women ought to be free to wear lipstick or overalls or both, without people "reading" their appearances as anything. But we live in an overwhelmingly visual society, with all of these connotations, expectations, and biases firmly in place already. The Beauty Myth raises our awareness of the absolutely unhealthy, hateful ways in which women are put down, and of the fabricated gender expectations that our society wrongly fosters. ( )

My parents gave me this at 13, and it changed my world. I stopped hating myself and started questioning the media. It kept me from sinking deeper into a burgeoning eating disorder. In short, I can't recommend it enough. ( )