Cairo – “The Gulf”
Naomi Wolf talks in her book “The Beauty Myth… How are images of beauty used against women?” Translated by Idris Mahmoud Naji, The issue of beauty standards that society places on women, and shows that the pressures that women feel to reach these unrealistic social standards are increase significantly due to the influence of the media, and the pressures that follow. to inappropriate behavior and excessive attention with the appearance of both sexes.
The author explains the ways in which the myth of beauty standards works in the workplace, and in the media, culture and religious areas. The concept of the book is based on the fact that increased the fictional physical beauty standards of women in parallel with the increase in their access to their rights in social spheres away all the rights and power of women, and also that these myths about beauty, make it advance the idea that there is an objective (non-subjective) standard of beauty that women must embrace, and men must aspire to.
When this book was published, public opinion believed that anorexia and bulimia were marginal behaviours, and were not accepted as society’s responsibility. In reality, young women suffered. Ordinary women from ordinary backgrounds suffered from these diseases, on a large scale, and they were just women and girls, trying to shape and maintain an unnatural body weight.
The author says that when beauty myths were analyzed in the early 1990s, it was pretty strict that older women were never allowed to appear in magazines, and if they did, they would it after repairing their faces, to appear younger. But now this myth has multiplied, and it can be said that it has become a beauty myth for example, a 17-year-old African-American model with African features and dark skin appeared on the cover of the New York. Times like the famous model at the time.
Has the multiracial beauty myth had an impact? Not quite. at the New York Times, she admitted that she removed the famous actress “Renee Zellweger” from the cover of Vogue magazine because she was very fat, that is, after being the same weight as a normal woman, and the model became thinner than Amazonian women in the eighties and nineties of the last century.
Woolf also talks about women’s magazines, and believes that they played an important role in promoting “the myth of beauty.” It is true that they contributed more to presenting the feminist movement to an audience of women than feminist books, but: medical prescription included an element that disturbed the mix and turned the medicine to poison. “Most women’s magazines are about diet, skin care and plastic surgery.” Before the Industrial Revolution, women’s social worth was measured by the work they did in a domestic context, and women’s lives at that time were shaped around a number of qualities such as work ability , physical strength, fertility rate, and not physical beauty, but with the industrial movement, increased levels of freedom and the rights women received.
In the fifties and sixties, the common image of women in advertisements was that of a housewife dedicated to her work, next to household products they advertised glorifying the value of housework and they always represented it as a job like other professions, in a way that made housewives feel satisfied, and not look for work outside the house.
