The Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth touched on the idea that all women based themselves on a certain criterion. Now that women are free and can vote and do more things than they could before, they must be suppressed some way. “If the beauty myth is not based on evolution, sex, gender, aesthetics, or God, on what is it based? It claims to be about intimacy and sex and life, a celebration of women. It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression. The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.” I believe Wolf is touching on the fact that men began to feel threatened by the amount of power women had been getting. As they grew older, they were establishing themselves in society. Women have been freed from the shackles from their yesteryears but only to be placed on even heavier constraints by the current generations. “We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement.” The idea that the beautiful women are good women is used as a deterrent to hinder the whole sex’s progress. This relates to The Handmaid’s Tale very strongly. The reason that there is a coup is so that women become subjective to men. When the revolution first happens, all the women’s cards and means of accessing money is cut off. They need to rely on men to do anything. Along with that, all women’s jobs are ended. The men of Gilead are much happier with this being the situation. When the women work for the men, the men do not need to install this idea about beauty. The women have already been suppressed enough. The use of the perfect beautiful women is destroyed, the actually destruction of every opportunity for a woman to succeed is enough to placate the men. That is not to say that a certain type of beauty myth does not exist in A Handmaid’s Tale. The women are indoctrinated to believe that a perfect handmaid is one that bears children and does not complain about it. There is still a criterion on which they can compare themselves to and, in the end, feel unsatisfactory about. I do not believe that this is present in present day Gilead, but it will be in the future generations. Once the initial hump of distress is passed and the world they life in is considered normal, the beauty myth will turn into the perfect handmaid myth, and the perfect econowive myth etc.