Word: wolfs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These are only some of the assertions of The Beauty Myth (Morrow; $21.95), a provocative work by San Francisco-born Naomi Wolf, 28, that is being published in the U.S. this spring. Already, and as might be expected, reaction is divided. Fans of the work call it daring and disturbing, but when it appeared in Britain last fall, many critics dipped their pens in acid, variously describing it as lurid and dishonest, and slamming the author as a "clever child." Others have extolled it as a feminist handbook...
Among other things, Wolf, a Yale graduate in literature, contends that today's women have been victimized in unprecedented ways by a "violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement." This victimization produces deep inside women "a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsession, terror of aging and dread of lost control...
...beauty myth of Wolf's title is reinforced, she argues, by a global industry worth billions that could be far better used for social purposes; for example, the money spent on cosmetics each year could finance 2,000 women's health clinics or pay for three times the amount of day care offered by the U.S. government. In addition, cosmetic surgery has boomed by playing on questionable ideas of health and sickness. Wolf chronicles the multiple ways that mass-culture images of women in advertising and pornography undermine female sexual self-worth. As a result of this bombardment, women learn...
...Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1986, Wolf had planned to write about the theme of beauty in literature. The Beauty Myth began taking shape when she heard someone remark that she had won the scholarship because of her looks. Says Wolf: "I had an image of the documents I had presented to the committee -- my essay, a book of poems I had written, letters of recommendation -- and the whole of it being swept away by that one sentence." Once she learned that other female Rhodes scholars had had similar tales told about them, she developed a new theme: that discussions...
...number of other personal experiences went into the book. As a junior high school student, Wolf was anorexic, as were many of her peers. She has combined those painful memories with alarming statistics in a chapter about eating disorders titled "Hunger," which argues that those ailments can be traced to a "cult of thinness" inculcated into women at an early age. Girls will continue to starve, she warns, until they are made to feel valuable with or without the excuse of beauty...