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A review by haileyelianna
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf
4.0
I had a love/hate relationship with this book. It is written by an academic and Naomi does not hesitate to let you know that through her writing! It was definitely not an easy read and I often found myself dreading picking it up and just dying to get it over with... There are so many statistics, so much information packed into the pages, and there are a lot of run-on sentences (at least in my opinion, I’m sure they’re grammatically correct but there were so many overly-long sentences that were hard to follow) and it was not written, overall, in a way that allows easy reading. This is a book you need to be REALLY ready to read and really want to learn from. Keep in mind, it is now about 30 years old, but while many statistics and examples may be outdated, the content of the book is just as relevant today as it ever was.
I am a feminist. I support anyone in whatever they want to do as long as it does not harm anyone or themselves. I believe in body positivity. I am against diet-culture. This book spoke to me in such a grand way, I truly was clutching onto my pencil throughout the whole thing, marking up the pages with notes and drawing parentheses in the margins by the many amazing points I found within the pages. The main theme of the book is how women are negatively affected by the media and how the patriarchy uses the media to keep women too busy with trivial obsessions to excel in other walks of life. Is this true for all women? No, but it is true for MANY women. I see that many people were not amused by Naomi’s hatred of dieting, but I must say that I agree with pretty much everything in the book and I would recommend it to pretty much any women over twenty years old. We are fed a narrative that we, as women, are never good enough, hot enough, sexual enough, and we internalize that narrative, project it onto others, and make ourselves miserable. If you’d like to take a step away from self-loathing and learn how to embrace your true self, this book will probably speak to you as much as it did to me.
I am a feminist. I support anyone in whatever they want to do as long as it does not harm anyone or themselves. I believe in body positivity. I am against diet-culture. This book spoke to me in such a grand way, I truly was clutching onto my pencil throughout the whole thing, marking up the pages with notes and drawing parentheses in the margins by the many amazing points I found within the pages. The main theme of the book is how women are negatively affected by the media and how the patriarchy uses the media to keep women too busy with trivial obsessions to excel in other walks of life. Is this true for all women? No, but it is true for MANY women. I see that many people were not amused by Naomi’s hatred of dieting, but I must say that I agree with pretty much everything in the book and I would recommend it to pretty much any women over twenty years old. We are fed a narrative that we, as women, are never good enough, hot enough, sexual enough, and we internalize that narrative, project it onto others, and make ourselves miserable. If you’d like to take a step away from self-loathing and learn how to embrace your true self, this book will probably speak to you as much as it did to me.