Free PDF The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf
Why should be reading The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf Once again, it will rely on exactly how you feel as well as consider it. It is definitely that people of the perk to take when reading this The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf; you could take more lessons directly. Also you have not undertaken it in your life; you could obtain the experience by reviewing The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf And also now, we will certainly present you with the online publication The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf in this website.
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf
Free PDF The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf
The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf When creating can transform your life, when writing can enhance you by offering much cash, why do not you try it? Are you still really baffled of where getting the ideas? Do you still have no idea with just what you are visiting compose? Now, you will certainly need reading The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf An excellent writer is an excellent visitor at once. You can specify just how you create depending upon exactly what publications to read. This The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf can aid you to fix the problem. It can be one of the ideal sources to establish your composing skill.
Why should be this book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf to review? You will never get the understanding and also experience without obtaining by yourself there or attempting by yourself to do it. Thus, reviewing this e-book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf is required. You can be great and also proper sufficient to get how crucial is reviewing this The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf Even you constantly read by obligation, you could support on your own to have reading e-book routine. It will be so valuable and also enjoyable then.
But, just how is the means to get this e-book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf Still perplexed? It matters not. You could delight in reviewing this publication The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf by on the internet or soft data. Simply download and install the e-book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf in the link supplied to see. You will obtain this The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf by online. After downloading and install, you can save the soft file in your computer or kitchen appliance. So, it will reduce you to review this book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf in certain time or place. It might be not exactly sure to enjoy reading this e-book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf, due to the fact that you have great deals of job. However, with this soft documents, you can delight in reading in the extra time even in the voids of your works in workplace.
Again, checking out behavior will always provide useful benefits for you. You might not require to spend sometimes to check out guide The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf Simply set apart several times in our spare or downtimes while having meal or in your office to read. This The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf will show you new thing that you can do now. It will certainly aid you to enhance the high quality of your life. Occasion it is simply a fun book The Beauty Myth: How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women, By Naomi Wolf, you can be happier and also a lot more fun to appreciate reading.
The bestselling classic that redefined our view od the relationship between beauty and female identity.
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 prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of 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."
- Sales Rank: #29434 in Books
- Brand: Harper Perennial
- Published on: 2002-09-24
- Released on: 2002-09-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .83" w x 5.31" l, .62 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
- Harper Perennial
Amazon.com Review
In a country where the average woman is 5-foot-4 and weighs 140 pounds, movies, advertisements, and MTV saturate our lives with unrealistic images of beauty. The tall, nearly emaciated mannequins that push the latest miracle cosmetic make even the most confident woman question her appearance. Feminist Naomi Wolf argues that women's insecurities are heightened by these images, then exploited by the diet, cosmetic, and plastic surgery industries. Every day new products are introduced to "correct" inherently female "flaws," drawing women into an obsessive and hopeless cycle built around the attempt to reach an impossible standard of beauty. Wolf rejects the standard and embraces the naturally distinct beauty of all women.
From Publishers Weekly
Wolf's valuable study, documenting societal pressures on women to conform to a standard of beauty, hit PW 's hardcover bestseller list for one week.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Journalist and poet Wolf presents a provocative and persuasive account of the pervasiveness of the beauty ideal in all facets of Western culture, including work, sex, and religion. In showing how this myth works against women and how women sabotage themselves by their complicity with this impossible standard, she discusses at length two unfortunate consequences: the growth in the number of bulimic and anorexic women and the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery. The facts are certainly stacked to prove her thesis but, for the most part, provide convincing evidence. In her final chapter, Wolf instructs women on how to crack the beauty myth. Recommended, especially for women's studies collections.
- Anne Twitchell, National Re search Council Lib., Washington,
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An enlightening read for either gender!
By Ginger
Naomi Wolf uses this book to slap all of society in the face. This smart and angry book testifies that women are confined by the single idea of “beauty” on the grounds of work, culture, religion, sex, hunger and violence. Wolf promises to enlighten readers with feminist ideas and enlighten readers about how enslaving the ideal “beauty” image truly is for women.
The Beauty Myth expands on the statement that “beauty” is a way to keep women as inferiors. Women fought for their rights and earned them, so society had to find a new way to suppress them. This book portrays a unique inequality beyond one of monetary value that women face between them and men; women are bound by impossible standards of appearance alongside working day in and day out to achieve status, while men simply must work hard to be successful. "What women look like is considered important because what we say is not,” Wolf tells us, illustrating this profound point in a such a simple way, showing readers that the facts would all be this simple if they were not purposefully hidden from us.
This book serves to expose the unfairness of the images of beauty. This seems so simple, but Wolf manages to separate her arguments into six main chapters, each filled with anecdotes and authorization through supported research. Reading through her novel as a woman, I felt that she was speaking to me personally. With each statistic, any woman reading this is faced with a simple fact that she is part of these numbers. While the book may emotionally appeal to women, I feel it would also be a great read for men. Men are often oblivious to the fact that the images of women around them are designed to put normal women’s appearances to shame, and could use this book to learn to not fall prey to ignoring a woman’s intelligence because of the way she looks.
The only weakness I see in Wolf’s writing is her absence of a counter-argument. There are parts of the novel where skeptical readers may be left with their doubts since she never addresses the opposing side of the argument.
The Beauty Myth promises to leave both male and female readers haunted by Naomi Wolf’s passionate fury towards the feminism movement.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A receptive audience, but I was rather disappointed…
By John P. Jones III
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. The cumulative scattered flakes of various women’s lives congealed into the impetus to finally read this book, one of the classics of feminist literature: A truly beautiful woman who truly thought she was ugly (and was not just fishing for compliments); an accomplished professional woman with an imperceptible lump on her nose who had to go through the horrors (as Wolf so well describes) of a “nose-job”; women who have to get breast implants that destroy the beauty and feel of a breast. And then there was all this generalized dissatisfaction with who they were – physically – far more so, than mentally.
Another “flake” that underscored what I felt was wrong about this book came from one conversation with an NGO “activist,” in Hanoi of all places, who was on a campaign to have landmines banned. Again, I was a “receptive audience.” Landmines were a scourge of some countries, notably Angola, Cambodia, and to a lesser extent, Vietnam, in which landmines were just one subset of the perils of unexploded ordinance, all of which were just one subset of the damage done to the country, which included the use of chemical weapons, such as Agent Orange. The NGO activist was trying to impress me with her many hard quantitative facts that fit so neatly into a spreadsheet… but as I pressed her on the methodology… the “how could you possibly know have many landmines were originally buried… how many remain… how many injuries were caused in time of war, and latter… I could tell she was largely just making it up. Good intentions, no doubt, and a shield of quantitative analysis, but isn’t that how McNamara operated?
With Naomi Wolf, the dubious stats starts early, and I noted another reviewer was disconcerted by the blunt, conclusory statement made on page 22: “Women work hard – twice as hard as men.” The worst chapter that contained a staccato machine-gun fire of dubious factoids is the one entitled “Hunger.” Consider: “One fifth of women who exercise to shape their bodies have menstrual irregularities and diminished fertility” (p192). At Treblinka, 900 calories was scientifically determined to be the minimum necessary to sustain human functioning” (p195). Scientifically?? “For women to stay at the official extreme of the weight spectrum requires 95 percent of us to infantilize or rigidify to some degree our mental lives” (p199). “Nothing justifies comparison with the Holocaust; but when confronted with a vast number of emaciated bodies starved not by nature but by men, one must notice a certain resemblance” (p207). Men?? Other chapters contain similar dubious factoids, like the percentage of rapes, and the extraordinary high percentage of rapes that occur between individuals who know each other, including spouses. Or, in the chapter on “Work”: “In the United States, partners of employed women give them LESS help than do partners of housewives” (p23).
‘Tis a pity, all of the above. Because there is so much to like about this book, and Wolf’s critical thinking about why “things are the way they are.” For example, I felt that her chapter entitled “Religion,” in which she describes how “the Beauty Myth” came to replace and utilize many of the techniques of organized religion, particularly in regards to the control of women. Likewise, the chapter on “Work” was strong, and I thought her discussion on the legal arguments, and abuse of the legal system in the promotion of something called the “Professional Beauty Qualification” most beneficial. In essence, can you fire a “Playboy bunny” which she gets to old, fat, or ugly… and how that concept might spread to any job held by a female. The chapter on “Violence” mainly describes not rape, as one might assume, but the assault by the underbelly of the medical profession (and some other assorted hucksters) who essentially convince women that they are not “real women” without some surgery… and how some women actually become “surgery addicts.”
Who are “the who”? Wolf never discusses who actually creates and enforces “the Beauty Myth.” Are they the proverbial five guys, in the backroom, with the cigars and brandy, who decide how they will control the rest of us? Or, is it something much deeper, about the human condition, relating to fundamental competition for a sexual or economic “prize”?
This book was originally published in 1991, thus, it was, for all practically purposes, pre-internet. Wolfe includes a new introduction written in 2002, in which she discusses the progress… and the steps back… which occurred in the intervening decade. And now, a decade and a half later, another update would be most appropriate. In particular, yesterday I was treated to the very battered-face of Ronda Rousey, as the lead article on the CNN website. She was the Ultimate Fighting Conference loser, in 47 seconds, to her Brazilian opponent. ANY discussion about “pornography” should commence with that battered face, the “fans” who spend so much to see it, and a mainstream news source that would published that face – without criticism – while shielding its tender readers from the pictures of the dead and wounded from the many wars we fight.
Wolf’s account carries numerous footnotes, but these are not directly tied to her quotes, a sampling of which were provided above. She references the works of several other leading feminists, for example, Betty Frieden, Susan Faludi, Catherine McKinnon and Andre Dworkin. The latter, and her influence, in particular, has concerned me. I gave Dworkin’s Intercourse a 3-star review. On the other hand, I was most impressed with Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women which I gave 5-stars to. As indicated, I was disappointed with this work, which, in addition to the above, contained serious redundancies and other editing problems. Overall, 3-stars.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Some interesting points are brought out.
By Brenda
Some really interesting points are brought out in this book. There's all kinds of beauty both from within and out. Understanding how beauty works is important. There's the beheld and the beholder.
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf PDF
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf EPub
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf Doc
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf iBooks
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf rtf
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf Mobipocket
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment