Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth

I first discovered Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth when my eighth grade science teacher handed me a copy to stick under a plank of wood for a project. At the time, I was mildly intrigued, and several weeks ago, I finally bought my own copy and began to read it.

The book is divided into chapters with general titles such as Sex or Violence, and with these chapters as her guide, Wolf carefully examines the major issues facing women today. These issues, according to Wolf, all lead back to the culture of beauty where women are forced into belonging.

The Beauty Myth (published in the 90's, but still relevant) is written rather dryly, with small tokens of wit and wisdom inserted. It's not meant to be a humorous book, but Wolf’s little jokes got my through the endless statistics. In addition, the book seemed only to focus on how these issues affect heterosexual whites. I would have liked to see how the “the beauty myth” affects other groups of people. Overall, however, the book was fascinating, dealing with many topics in a straightforward, immediate, way.

Book Review: Female Chauvinist Pigs (Ariel Levy)

Sex sells, and the vast majority of female celebrities (the charming young generation who can't take a few cents out of their extensive paychecks to buy some undies) know; they follow this unwritten creed of the adverstising and beauty industry as a mantra. In a culture where females as young as ten twirl a stripper pole as a baton of empowerment, how thin is the line between women’s liberation and carefully-disguised exploitation? Ariel Levy explores this and other issues in her first book, Female Chauvinist Pigs. In Levy’s study to determine whether porn stars, strippers, and swingers really are unshackled from the binds of culture, or just creating a new, equally limiting, culture, she examines everything from lesbian sex parties to ‘Girls Gone Wild’ casting ploys. In her interviews with everyone from self-proclaimed liberated ‘bois’ to Christie Hefner herself, Levy quickly uncovers the destructive irony hidden in raunch culture, where women aren’t pushed around by men anymore, they’re pushing each other themselves. Female Chauvinist Pigs is as darkly humorous as it is terrifying, an essential read for any female (or any man) who dares to call herself empowered in this sex-saturated world.