The woman who dies thinnest, with the fewest wrinkles, wins.
Catalog
Book
The Beauty Myth
Characters
What is beautiful about her body does not belong to her, but to god. But what is ugly is hers alone, proof of her sin, worthy of any abuse.
Why do women care so much what the magazines say and show? They care because, though magazines are trivialized, they represent something very important: women's mass culture
Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society.
To be credible about being harassed, in any case, a woman must look harassable, which destroys her credibility.
The working woman was told she had to think about 'beauty' in a way that undermined, step for step, the way she had begun to think as a result of the successes of the women's movement. This last vital lie applied to individual women's lives the central rule of the myth: For every feminist action the…
What it needed was a replacement shackle, a new material burden that would drain surplus energy and lower confidence, an ideology that would produce the women workers it needs, but only in the mold in which it wants them.
In the West, where paid labor centers on a forty-hour week, the unavoidable fact to confront the power structure is that women newcomers came from a group used to working more than twice as hard and long as men. And not only for less pay; for none.
Aging in women is "unbeautiful" since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear young ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span.