Customer Rating:  
Summary: Vital reading for women - balanced but powerful
Comment: An interesting and insightful look at the way modern society uses beauty ideals to undermine women socially and psychologically, in order to keep its politics and economy in order. The book covers various aspects of this repression, from sex and work, to surgery and dieting. It occasionally veers into slightly OTT territory near the beginning, but by the final section, 'Beyond the Beauty Myth' the reader is fully on the side of the achievable vision Wolf presents of a united womanhood in which competition and striving for acceptance via beauty is replaced with sisterhood, freedom and confident sexuality. Thought-provoking and very relevant in today's size 0-obsessed culture.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Based upon a false premise
Comment: Wolf draws her examples of the supposed female ideal from films, television, advertising and magazines.
What she appears not to have noticed is that all of these are overwhelmingly aimed at a female audience and not at males. Presumably this is the type that is depicted because market research has indicated that this is what women like to look at.
I can assure you that it is not what most men like looking at.
If women want to get an idea of what men like they should have a look at pornography which is after all aimed at an exclusively male audience.
Once they got over the initial shock they might find it surprising and actually encouraging because what pornography shows is that there's actually a much wider range of female shapes and sizes that men find appealing than the average woman might think.
Customer Rating:
Summary: interesting and well researched
Comment: I'm not an expert in feminist literature and don't have any strong opinions on the subject. I found this to be a very interesting read, though quite a bit of it bordered on the unpleasant and the disturbing--rape, violence, surgical violation of the body. It also treads the line between the scholarly and the general interest book, although it's probably much closer to the latter. Very well written, it felt a bit tragic, poetic, philosophical, and almost Freudian in style. A general criticism: could it be that some women seek to beautify themselves, even in an extreme manner, somewhat independent of modern societal, or patriarchical, influences? An evolutionary biologist might argue that some if not most women might have an emphasis on beauty that is hardwired into their brains, and we are simply observing a manifestation of that inherent nature in the modern environment. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Idea for a Book
Comment: But it falls short.
I was very eager to buy this book, the contents and a brief scan through it would give it the appearence of a great read and insightful source of information on how beauty, particularly female beauty, has been mythologised and effects work, culture, religion and sex but the writing is like that of a columnist or a collection of magazine shorts, which is a real, real shame.
The problem I found was that you could agree with the essential premise and perspective under pinning the whole work, many of the examples and illustrative points are brilliant, if largely anecdotal or journalistic, but the writing style, seriously labouring some points and dragging them out to fit entire chapters when a few pages would have sufficed proved a real stumbling block for me when trying to finish it.
I had hoped for a book which would be largely like Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex which ranged across psychology, philosophy, religion and politics to describe the differentiated status of women in society and how it proves unfair and oppressive to women, and ultimately men too, but with a finer focus upon the topic of beauty and body image, however I hope without being unkind to Naomi Wolf this isnt it.
If it is pop feminism for a younger audience, particularly those troubled by their body image, then perhaps this is the read for you, if you want a more weighty feminist anthropology or psychology then perhaps look to another source.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful ideas, yet incomplete
Comment: I found this to be a wonderful first point of call on issues of negativity surrounding the eternal feminine.
I'm not a fan of turning sexuality into an idea. Outer beauty has clear subjective (conscious) and biological (unconscious) causes and conditions, which can only ever be understood in the present moment through direct experience. However, for the sake of debate, I feel that this book certainly provides a 'cat amongst pigeons' offering for people to reconsider how their subjective view of female (and male for that mattter) beauty can be so incorrect, and harmful.
The pain some women feel at the hands of ideation of beauty is certainly afflictive and a tragedy for their consciousness. However, all of us being interdependent, their pain is our responsiblity. In this way, Wolf is worthy of utter gratitude for her responsible bone-pointing at the media beauty industry. I have always found it amusing that magazines seem to hand our humanity to us as a package to purchase and aspire to. That point alone is enough to heap some praise on this work.
Calls on our comments on this page to reject the views offered in her book on the basis of her being a model are simply ad hominem, and therefore fallacious.
However, I find this work to be incomplete in not offering a consideration of the possible positive workings of beauty. Of course beauty isn't a "thing", yet it certainly is a quality of conscousness or at least mind which, when experienced non-judgementally, brings us to our most wonderful core. In this way, I think Wolf falls short by taking the assertive or aggressive tack of the violent feminist movement archetype rather than offering a much more humane treatment of our underlying capacity to experience beauty without the violence of personal judgement. In this way, beauty doesn't need to be undermined, considered a myth, and dissociated from - but rather, experienced maturely, with non-judgemental awareness and therefore through deep association, is capable of being transcended.
Why deny the splendor of our existence? Why deny desire? That is weakness. Real strength of character and compassion is to transcend the creation of suffering of others thorugh miscalculations of reality. Moreover, transcendence can only occur through acceptance and equanimity and a full and thorough non-violent expression of our deepest desire. We are all beautiful, and yet some may seem more attractive simply on the basis of their physical appearance, and when we can truly see and live that truth, rather than rejecting beauty as an experience of consciousness, then we're capable of personal and interpersonal freedom. Beauty and attraction are very different qualities, and I wish Wolf would have dealt with that point. It would have made this book so much more true to our honest human nature.
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