Yet it’s easy to understand why my friend Emily has not, in recent decades, demanded the return of her signed copy. I was moved and proud that the 1990s feminism of my own youth was still alive and raising the consciousness of today’s young women. It’s still taught in high schools several years ago, I overheard a group of New York City schoolgirls discussing it on the subway with passion and righteous indignation. It made feminists out of many of my contemporaries and helped inspire the feminist Third Wave, which included the Lesbian Avengers, abortion rights organizing, Take Back the Night marches, “pro-sex” feminism, and much more. The Beauty Myth was the kind of book we talked up, borrowed, and never gave back. The copy, it turned out, wasn’t even mine-it belongs to my oldest friend, Emily, and, thrillingly, was inscribed by the author: “To Emily, Love and Hope, Naomi Wolf.” edition, and the cover shows a black and white photo of a naked woman with an entirely bandaged face sitting pensively under an end table that precisely frames her body. The other day, after Wolf was kicked off Twitter for promulgating anti-vaccine claptrap, I took my copy of The Beauty Myth off the bookshelf to remind myself why she mattered to us back in the day. The metaphor powerfully conveys how consumer society’s pretty pictures of pretty women mask the starvation and torture we endure in pursuit of beauty.
Each chapter title, for example, is one word: “Work,” “Sex,” “Hunger.” A memorable image describes how the beauty myth functions: the iron maiden, a medieval torture instrument decorated on the outside with a smiling and attractive image of a young girl. And like many books in the tradition of feminist screeds, The Beauty Myth ’s power derives in part from prose that signifies both simplicity and profundity. She could not be accused of sour grapes or resentment a stereotypically “ugly” or even average-looking feminist would not have been able to attack the beauty industry with equal credibility. Its author was pretty and presentable (“tourable,” as the publishing industry used to say before #MeToo). Here was a feminist disquisition of old-school proportions: a big fat analysis of how profit and patriarchy conspire to make women feel bad about ourselves, joined with a call to action.
Published in 1990, Naomi Wolf’s breakout hit, The Beauty Myth, changed all that. The days of the feminist bestseller were past, it appeared-and with them, the power of a transformative movement. Feminist ideas no longer seemed to inspire people to picket their workplaces or leave their husbands. The women’s movement was still intellectually fruitful-scholars and activists debated sexuality, class, and race in anthologies published by university presses-but it had lost its visceral urgency. Under Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Phyllis Schlafly, feminism was in retreat. But the 1980s were a more pessimistic, less ambitious time. The weighty feminist classics that had shaken the world from the midcentury through the 1970s-Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will-had been read by millions. When I graduated from college in 1991, Naomi Wolf was a feminist icon, and the only person of or close to my generation who merited the designation.
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