Wolf's book was a quick bestseller, garnering intensely polarized responses from the public and mainstream media, but winning praise from many feminists.
Ultimately, Wolf argues for a relaxation of normative standards of beauty. Wolf argued that women were under assault by the "beauty myth" in five areas: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Wolf writes that women should have "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically". Wolf criticizes the fashion and beauty industries as exploitative of women, but claims the beauty myth extends into all areas of human functioning. Wolf also posits the idea of an iron maiden, an intrinsically unattainable standard that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for their failure to achieve and conform to it. ornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. uring the past decade, women breached the power structure meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty. The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us. In her introduction, Wolf offers the following analysis: This pressure leads to unhealthy behaviors by women and a preoccupation with appearance in both sexes, and it compromises the ability of women to be effective in and accepted by society. The basic premise of The Beauty Myth is that as the social power and prominence of women have increased, the pressure they feel to adhere to unrealistic social standards of physical beauty has also grown stronger because of commercial influences on the mass media. It was republished in 2002 by HarperPerennial with a new introduction. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women is a nonfiction book by Naomi Wolf, originally published in 1990 by Chatto & Windus in the UK and William Morrow & Co (1991) in the United States. Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How To Use It
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