it's very much a critique for straight white women, which just isn't that useful. partly it was that this was mostly not new information to me and so not revelatory, but this also wasn't in any way intersectional. coming right on the heels of the new jim crow was particularly unfortunate for my reading of this book because of how much more the other resonated. but this was definitely not true for this book. I usually feel like i read each book that i read at just the time i'm supposed to. in fact, i ended up scanning just about the entire book. This is outdated, both in the sense that i didn't find a lot of new-to-me concepts and ideas, and that the information in here is old and not very relatable. Despite these flaws, Wolf does, however, paint a very clear and precise picture of the ways that women's minds and bodies are attacked (psychologically, metaphorically) on a daily basis. It's really a shame, since this is such an important topic that everyone, male or female, should read about, but it's just written about so poorly here, with little evidence to back things up. For most of the book she writes as if women are victims with no agency of their own, and her very brief discussion of eating disorders reduces the women who suffer from them to victims who caved into societal and cultural pressure, whereas it comes from a combination of things including depression and genetics, rather than simply aggressive advertising. The first couple of chapters talk about the beauty myth like a conspiracy, as if there's a group of men holding meetings going 'Hmm, how shall we make women feel inferior this time?' Naomi Wolf never clearly identifies 'the oppressors' (which I infer from the text that it's a combination of various factors, including social hierarchy, the economy, and so on) though she does mention much later in the book that regular men are not into the thinness and beauty standards set by the beauty myth. Good arguments but presented really poorly.

Author of the beauty myth