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The Beauty Myth

The Beauty Myth

  • How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity .

Every day, women around the world are confronted with a dilemma – how to look. In a society embroiled in a cult of female beauty and youthfulness, pressure on women to conform physically is constant and all-pervading. In this iconic, gripping and frank exposé, Naomi Wolf exposes the tyranny of the beauty myth through the ages and its oppressive function today, in the home and at work, in literature and the media, in relationships between men and women, between women and women. With pertinent and intelligent examples, she confronts the beauty industry and its advertising and uncovers the reasons why women are consumed by this destructive obsession.

‘Essential reading’ Guardian

‘A smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom. Every woman should read it’ Gloria Steinem

Reviews

  • Powerful... No other work has...so honestly depicted the confusion of accomplished women who feel emotionally and physically tortured by the need to look like movie stars

    New York Times

  • A brilliant, bracing book...The world has changed - a bit - over the past decade and a half, but not enough: this remains essential reading

    Guardian

More from this Author

About the Author

Naomi Wolf

Naomi Wolf is a bestselling American writer, known for her advocacy of feminism and progressive politics. She studied at Yale before becoming a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, and working in Edinburgh. She became internationally famous with the publication of her first book, The Beauty Myth, in 1991, and has gone on to write many subsequent titles, including: Fire with Fire, Promiscuities, Misconceptions, The Tree House and Vagina: A New Biography.

Naomi Wolf

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