![]() ![]() I just cannot over-emphasise how important a book this is. Where Wolf wrote of a beauty culture in 1990, Ariel Levy writes in 2006 about a raunch culture – but essentially these are two sides of the same coin, and much of what Wolf says is still bang on. Culturally, little has changed for the middle class Western women about whom Wolf has written since the publication of this book in 1990, except that the beauty myth she explored and documented has if anything intensified and has been charged with a heavy dose of pornsex. In this, her first book, Naomi Wolf examines the way in which (Western, primarily middle class) women are oppressed and controlled by the imposition of beauty requirements on every aspect of their daily lives. Until our culture tells young girls that they are welcome in any shape – that women are valuable to it with or without the excuse of “beauty” – girls will continue to starve. What about now? No? Now? The larger world never gives girls the message that their bodies are valuable simply because they are inside them. I kept a wetted finger up to the winds of that larger world: Too thin yet? I was asking it. ![]() It is the larger world’s messages, young women know, to which they will have to listen if they are to leave their parents’ protection. I knew my parents wanted me not to starve because they loved me but their love contradicted the message of the larger world, which wanted me to starve in order to love me. ![]()
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