In 1991, feminist scholar Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, a giant and daring work of nonfiction that put to paper the oppressive beauty ideals of the day. It cleverly traced the links between patriarchy, the ideals peddled in contemporary promoting and pornography and increased pressures for ladies to get surgery alongside rising numbers of eating disorder diagnoses. 

“Western economies are absolutely depending on the continued underpayment of girls,” she wrote within the introduction. “An ideology that makes women feel ‘price less’ was urgently needed to counteract the best way feminism had begun to make us feel price more.” Gloria Steinem praised the book, while the likes of Camille Paglia criticised it heavily.

Today, greater than half a dozen books later (most recently, Outrages, about sex and censorship in nineteenth century Britain), Naomi is sitting across from me in a restaurant in Edinburgh, the town where she wrote The Beauty Myth 28 years ago. She was 28 when she wrote it, and I’m 28 now, so we decided to have a conversation about how pressures for ladies to be ‘beautiful’ or ‘sexy’ have modified between our generations, and the way much of her famous first book still rings true. 

To begin with, in case you can solid your mind back to 1990, why did you choose to write down this book? Was it personal or political? 

Naomi Wolf: As one of the best of feminism teaches, there isn’t any distinction! I might say it was each personal and academic and political. I actually wrote it here in Edinburgh. I used to wander these streets determining my thesis. I had just left Oxford, a very good university with really smart young women around me who were overwhelmingly preoccupied with an obsession about their weight or their body or their appearance. It drained their energies, so we weren’t as politically motivated as we should always have been. 

This wasn’t totally recent: I’d studied in Oxford the nineteenth century and knew the primary wave of feminists were struggling against a unique set of norms imposed on them – the thought of woman was that doll-like, silent, tiny, child-like being. Then later, when Betty Friedan was writing, the right housewife became the unattainable ideal. Now, in the 20th century, I could see amongst my very own friends and myself that there was an analogous backlash to women’s liberation, however it had morphed into these very rigid, thin beauty ideals – perfect, computer-enhanced images to which we were asked to be enslaved. For instance, supermodels, or the breast implants which were being promoted in women’s magazines with no warning or caveats at the moment – no studies. Doctors were getting insurance since the implants ruptured so often, right, but they weren’t telling their patients. Essentially, once I saw my thesis, I saw examples in every single place.

How would you summarise The Beauty Myth as a term? What does that mean? 

Naomi Wolf: I suppose The Beauty Myth is the premise that there’s a literal – albeit inhumane – state of physical perfection that doesn’t actually correspond to any human qualities but that nonetheless, as women, we’re all purported to commit ourselves to.

“You don’t really understand anything until you understand who had money and who had power”

What I feel happens so much with seminal books, like yours, is that the ideas turn out to be so widespread that years on we predict of them as obvious. But they weren’t on the time…

Naomi Wolf: Thanks. I appreciate that because something that worries me, especially about feminism, about any activist movement, is that we’re normally marginalised individuals who will not be in command of any media production or history, and so the history of feminist ideas is that generations must keep reinventing the wheel from scratch, since the narrative is lost. 

Other activists and truly, each wave of feminists, has grappled with beauty ideals. I actually had big shoulders to face on. For example, Amelia Bloomer was a First Wave feminist within the nineteenth century who did a whole lot of activism around dress reform; there have been dress reformers who advocated not lacing so tightly. And it was reported that Second Wave feminists burned their bras in a trash can on the Miss America 1969 protest. So there had been other critiques of beauty ideals as oppressive, but within the early Nineties, we had really undergone a period of erasing and discrediting feminism. The media was stuffed with the narrative that feminism was over with, that ladies were rejecting it, had no need for it. Nobody wanted to make use of the ‘F word’ to explain themselves.

So that you were between waves when writing?

Naomi Wolf: Yes, but I suppose you might have to initiate a wave! There have been other voices like Rebecca Walker writing concurrently I used to be, who were beginning to say ‘wait a minute, we’re not done with this’. But I might say that mine was the primary book of the era specifically to take care of the production of beauty ideals which are normative now; digitised or a minimum of computer-altered images, the wonder ideals of pornography which the Second Wave didn’t must grapple with a lot, and likewise anorexia and bulimia. 

I might also say if I’m going to look back and make a claim – which I feel women should do in the event that they’re entitled to! – I don’t know that there was a book that captured the connection of beauty ideals to larger political and economic issues. I’m not taken with critiquing beauty ideals only for their very own sake, or simply to make people feel higher; I’m taken with Marxist outcomes. I don’t mean “Marxist” within the sense of a centralised economy, but “Marxist” within the sense of: “follow the cash.” You don’t really understand anything until you understand who had money and who had power, and so The Beauty Myth traces how beauty ideals keep women from having money and power. 

Your book may be very much about how patriarchy uses beauty for the oppression of girls. Some things have modified in thirty years, though. One thing is that we’ve got had a whole lot of advancements when it comes to equality – we’re still living in a patriarchal and heteronormative world but a tiny bit less so! Do you think that that affects attitudes to beauty? 

Naomi Wolf: Totally. This stuff are very connected and I definitely need to stress that a whole lot of things have gotten so a lot better in thirty years and I feel the LGBTQ+ movement is one reason things have gotten higher. It’s rather more common for my daughter’s generation, my son’s generation, to not consider the world in binary terms. I do not think that my daughter’s generation of young women feels enslaved to femininity and if my son’s generation dresses beautifully, they don’t feel like they’re traitors to their gender. 

People say to me, ‘how do you raise children who will not be influenced by beauty norms?’ You’ll be able to’t eliminate these images, it’s in every single place, it’s capitalism, but young people can have a critique inside their brains. The LGBTQ+ critique of heteronormativity and patriarchy has opened up the world for people to challenge male heterosexual patriarchal dominance. I feel you see just generally so much more people’s entitlement to individuality – like cosmetics for men, for ladies, for individuals with no specified gender. I feel that there’s rather more of a way of creativity, subjectivity and variety. But while all of those things have gotten higher, at the identical time – I still see that levels of anorexia and bulimia are static. And more men are obsessive about their appearance as The Beauty Myth has sort of claimed the male body more, it has commodified the male body. 

“Capitalism needed to do a whole lot of marketing to straight men to get them to be comfortable with self-presentation” 

Why do you think that that’s happening? 

Naomi Wolf: Once I was twenty-four, men observed and ladies were observed. But there’s been a whole lot of dismantling of the male gaze. One results of that’s that men of all sexualities are well aware that they’re being observed. They feature more as objects of individuals’s gaze. It’s not a gay thing or straight thing. Teenage men of whatever sexuality have so much more self- consciousness within the Instagram age about being beautiful objects… “Am I hot?” It’s not a matter men were really asking in the event that they weren’t gay, in my generation. Once I was growing up, a whole lot of straight men expressed their sense of entitlement because the observer by not taking good care of themselves. And homophobia plays a component on this – young straight men were afraid of being seen as gay in the event that they used a hair product or smelled higher! I feel it was a deeply homophobic time when it got here to the male body and male self-perception. 

Capitalism needed to do a whole lot of marketing to straight men to get them to be comfortable with self-presentation and to be physical beings that desired to appeal to other people. What’s modified is usually for good, however it’s also difficult for teenage boys in that they now have the sort of hysteria that teenage girls often have.

In what other ways do you think social media has modified things on the subject of beauty? 

Naomi Wolf: I do think there’s so much more of a way of diversity about beauty – there’s rather more appreciation for the range of human fabulousness, and social media is a component of that. The opposite side of it’s that nobody is at rest. 

What else do you think that has modified on the earth of beauty? 

Naomi Wolf: The marketing of products. The massive thing that was driving me crazy once I was writing The Beauty Myth is that individuals were lying about facial creams and saying that they penetrate the dermis and offer everlasting youth and so forth. It was a giant industry – women were wasting a whole lot of money on these products. What I’m blissful about is that this language doesn’t appear to be used anymore. People still sell face creams, obviously, but they will’t just lie any longer concerning the effects of the product – I do know American consumer law has cracked down on that. So I feel promoting standards have improved. 

You talk within the book about how beauty standards pit women against each other, a sort of divide and conquer thing, but additionally how standards make us put ourselves down. Could you say a bit more on that? It also jogged my memory of this Amy Schumer sketch from ages ago, the ladies within the sketch who say, ‘you look incredible!’ to at least one one other they usually’re each like, ‘oh my god, no! I appear like a chunk of shit!’ Have you ever seen it? 

Naomi Wolf: Yeah – it’s so funny! Once I was growing up, women were encouraged to see one another as rivals for men’s attention, rivals for only a few good jobs…

Because there have been fewer opportunities for ladies? 

Naomi Wolf: Yes, it was also only a patriarchal society; in case you encourage women to see one another as rivals, they’re not going to come back together to try to vary things. I don’t feel just like the world is similar anymore. I actually don’t! The Amy Schumer sketch is absolutely funny because we’re still encouraged to not take compliments but I see women having fun with one another’s beauty rather more now and appreciating one another.

Why do you think that that’s?

Naomi Wolf: Well, truthfully, one a part of it may very well be that lots of your generation and the generation below yours have deconstructed heterosexuality because the norm. More young people than ever before define themselves as something apart from heterosexual… so I feel it’s more common that ladies are like, “she’s hot… I need to sleep together with her”. It’s not everyone’s experience after all but I feel that even amongst women who don’t discover as fluid of their sexuality – there’s so much less phobia about the concept that women might need to sleep with other women. 

“We want a new edition of The Beauty Myth for today”

We’re living in a time when one can hypothetically, through science or technology, change their physical body or digital body to look nonetheless they need it to…. Means and access allowing, after all. It’s rather more possible to really transform yourself into the person you should be. How does that change our relationship with The Beauty Myth?

Naomi Wolf: I mean I don’t think we actually know yet. It may very well be really liberating or it may very well be sort of Orwellian – or each! I feel you’ve really put your finger on a deep philosophical query. Once I was growing up, you were sort of stuck with what the fates handed you, physically, unless you made huge efforts to change your physical reality. Now every kind of things are possible and also you’re not stuck together with your gender or with really anything except your mortality. And so I feel like… I’m not the correct generation to reply that query! 

The indisputable fact that it’s even possible to rework yourself like this concurrently makes me feel as if The Beauty Myth is working stronger than ever before – that we’re finding more ways to undergo dominant beauty ideals. But then again, in case you can change every thing and achieve the “perfect body” (whatever meaning), it takes away a whole lot of the mystique, as in it’s not an excellent since it’s sort of surgically attainable. I can’t really work out which it’s… perhaps it’s each!

Naomi Wolf: That’s why we want a new edition of The Beauty Myth for today! I used to be 24 once I first began writing this book, beauty was sort of mystified… like God gave it to you or didn’t. It was more primitive. Now we see people just like the Kardashians transform themselves through interventions or product and elements of which are available to anyone who can save up enough money. By de-mystifying, I do think people feel less obligated. 

Once I was your age it was so common to think, ‘Oh no, I can’t look any older!’ and the fear of ageing really affected me as a young woman. Some women are going to fret about ageing or try to stop that, others aren’t. I feel like these fears are more voluntary in your generation. 

That brings me to my last query… what have you ever learned about beauty at 56?

Naomi Wolf: The British media are really weird because they’re so misogynist… They really demonise older women, but actually among the many older women I meet, who’ve been busy with their lives, I don’t know any of them who will not be really thrilled to be their age (so long as they’re healthy) and are really blissful with where they’re at, physically and in every other way.