In the early 1970's western women gained new rights in many places but the question Wolf present's in her book "The Beauty Myth" is do women really free? In her book she details the fight women go through for their rights for equality but are still struggling with the image society portrays for women to actually have power and equality.
Wolf starts by talking about how women began to breach the gender power struggle but in doing so men and society construct a new image that make women begin to feel the need to revolve around: Beauty. A new standard for what people thought was beautiful drove women to new levels of eating disorders, a rise in cosmetic surgery and an overall increase in consumer spending. Wolf calls this "The Beauty Myth" and women focused more on how they looked than their ambitions because women who reached their goals seemed to look a certain way or have a certain figure. Women were no longer held back by the notions of motherhood and domesticity but by losing ten pounds or having a sense of sexual selfworth.
This beauty myth becomes part of something even Darwin doesn't fully believe in called "sexual selection." Where women who embody beauty are considered more reproductively successful and so beauty becomes objective. "Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it." …show more content…
In the past the iron maiden was a german torture device used in the midevil times. It was a casket with a women painted on the outside of it that when closed would kill its victim by either the spikes embedded on the inside or from starvation. Wolf uses this as a symbol for women and how their beauty kills them from inside. A caricature was made to ridicule feminists in the 19th century "that resurrected caricature, which sought to punish women for their public acts by going after their private sense of self, became the paradigm for new limits placed on aspiring women
Wolf starts by talking about how women began to breach the gender power struggle but in doing so men and society construct a new image that make women begin to feel the need to revolve around: Beauty. A new standard for what people thought was beautiful drove women to new levels of eating disorders, a rise in cosmetic surgery and an overall increase in consumer spending. Wolf calls this "The Beauty Myth" and women focused more on how they looked than their ambitions because women who reached their goals seemed to look a certain way or have a certain figure. Women were no longer held back by the notions of motherhood and domesticity but by losing ten pounds or having a sense of sexual selfworth.
This beauty myth becomes part of something even Darwin doesn't fully believe in called "sexual selection." Where women who embody beauty are considered more reproductively successful and so beauty becomes objective. "Women must want to embody it and men must want to possess women who embody it." …show more content…
In the past the iron maiden was a german torture device used in the midevil times. It was a casket with a women painted on the outside of it that when closed would kill its victim by either the spikes embedded on the inside or from starvation. Wolf uses this as a symbol for women and how their beauty kills them from inside. A caricature was made to ridicule feminists in the 19th century "that resurrected caricature, which sought to punish women for their public acts by going after their private sense of self, became the paradigm for new limits placed on aspiring women