Beauty Myth Tobias Wolf Analysis

• Paragraph 1 - 6: The author asserts that women gained rights and freedom after long silence but contemporary women are not free as they want to. She explains that “we are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism,” (Wolf 185) which the notion of beauty is poisoning women’s liberty and rights. The images of “beautiful” women are used against women’s advancement.

• Paragraph 7 – 8: Wolf describes that “beauty” became very essential in women’s life. For instance, women must have beauty knowledge, pornography invaded the mainstream, eating disorder rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery controls women medically.

• Paragraph 9 – 11: According to the story of “beauty myth”, beautiful women are more likely to be successful and be wanted by men.

Before industrial revolution and development of technology, “beauty” as what we not understand was not for the ordinary women.

• Paragraph 16 – 17: First image of beautiful women that describes how women should look, appeared in mid century. Western women have been controlled by stereotypes, ideals, and material constraints since industrial revolution.

• Paragraph 18 – 21: Wolf asserts that as women gained freedoms, society colonized women’s consciousness by utilizing notion of “beauty” and reconstructing female world. She explains that “the modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal” (Wolf, 193).

• Paragraph 22: The hallucination of beauty grows more influential because of market manipulation. The diet, cosmetic surgery and pornography industries are controlling billions of economies.

• Paragraph 23 – 24: Wolf highlights that “contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the iron maiden [- a body shaped medieval instrument of torture that was in feature of a lovely, smiling young woman -],” (196) by trapping women into the beauty