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 girls 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 ‘value less’ was urgently needed to counteract the way in which feminism had begun to make us feel value 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, 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 girls 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, should you can solid your mind back to 1990, why did you select to jot down this book? Was it personal or political? 

Naomi Wolf: As the perfect of feminism teaches, there is no such thing as a 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 superb 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 must always have been. 

This wasn’t totally latest: I’d studied in Oxford the nineteenth century and knew the primary wave of feminists were struggling against a special set of norms imposed on them – the concept of woman was that doll-like, silent, tiny, child-like being. Then later, when Betty Friedan was writing, the proper housewife became the unattainable ideal. Now, in the 20th century, I could see amongst my very own friends and myself that there was the same backlash to women’s liberation, nevertheless 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 all places.

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 presupposed to commit ourselves to.

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

What I believe happens so much with seminal books, like yours, is that the ideas develop into 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 aren’t accountable for 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 really, 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 number 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 Nineteen Nineties, we had really passed through a period of erasing and discrediting feminism. The media was filled with the narrative that feminism was over with, that girls 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’ve gotten 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 at the least computer-altered images, the sweetness 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 believe 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 serious about critiquing beauty ideals only for their very own sake, or simply to make people feel higher; I’m serious about 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 number of advancements by way of equality – we’re still living in a patriarchal and heteronormative world but a tiny bit less so! Do you’re thinking that that affects attitudes to beauty? 

Naomi Wolf: Totally. This stuff are very connected and I definitely wish to stress that a number of things have gotten so significantly better in thirty years and I believe the LGBTQ+ movement is one reason things have gotten higher. It’s way 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 aren’t influenced by beauty norms?’ You’ll be able to’t eliminate these images, it’s in all places, 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 believe you see just generally so much more people’s entitlement to individuality – like cosmetics for men, for girls, for individuals with no specified gender. I believe that there may be way 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 type of claimed the male body more, it has commodified the male body. 

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

Why do you’re thinking that that’s happening? 

Naomi Wolf: Once I was twenty-four, men observed and ladies were observed. But there’s been a number 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 number of straight men expressed their sense of entitlement because the observer by not taking good care of themselves. And homophobia plays an element 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 believe it was a deeply homophobic time when it got here to the male body and male self-perception. 

Capitalism needed to do a number 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, nevertheless it’s also difficult for teenage boys in that they now have the type of tension that teenage girls often have.

In what other ways do you think social media has modified things relating to beauty? 

Naomi Wolf: I do think there’s so much more of a way of diversity about beauty – there’s way 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’re thinking that has modified on this planet of beauty? 

Naomi Wolf: The marketing of products. The massive thing that was driving me crazy after 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 number of money on these products. What I’m comfortable about is that this language doesn’t appear to be used anymore. People still sell face creams, obviously, but they’ll’t just lie any longer concerning the effects of the product – I do know American consumer law has cracked down on that. So I believe promoting standards have improved. 

You talk within the book about how beauty standards pit women against each other, a type 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 1 one other and so they’re each like, ‘oh my god, no! I appear to be a bit 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 girls? 

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

Why do you’re thinking that that’s?

Naomi Wolf: Well, truthfully, one a part of it could possibly 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 aside from heterosexual… so I believe it’s more common that girls are like, “she’s hot… I would like to sleep together with her”. It’s not everyone’s experience in fact but I believe that even amongst women who don’t discover as fluid of their sexuality – there’s so much less phobia about the concept women might wish 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 nevertheless they need it to…. Means and access allowing, in fact. It’s way more possible to really transform yourself into the person you must be. How does that change our relationship with The Beauty Myth?

Naomi Wolf: I mean I don’t think we actually know yet. It could possibly be really liberating or it could possibly be type of Orwellian – or each! I believe you’ve really put your finger on a deep philosophical query. Once I was growing up, you were type 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 fitting generation to reply that query! 

The incontrovertible fact that it’s even possible to remodel 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 alternatively, should you can change all the pieces and achieve the “perfect body” (whatever which means), it takes away a number of the mystique, as in it’s now not a super since it’s type of surgically attainable. I can’t really work out which it’s… perhaps it’s each!

Naomi Wolf: That’s why we’d like a new edition of The Beauty Myth for today! I used to be 24 after I first began writing this book, beauty was type 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 points 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 aren’t really thrilled to be their age (so long as they’re healthy) and are really comfortable with where they’re at, physically and in every other way.