Editing Naomi Wolf (section)

===''The Beauty Myth'' (1991)===
[[File:NLN Naomi Wolf.jpg|thumb|Wolf speaking at [[Brooklyn Law School]], January 29, 2009]]
In 1991, Wolf gained international attention as a spokeswoman of [[third-wave feminism]] after the publication of her first book, ''[[The Beauty Myth]]'', an international bestseller.<ref name="Sindy1995">{{cite news|last=Smith|first=Joan|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-seer-and-the-sisters-1577737.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220618/https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-seer-and-the-sisters-1577737.html |archive-date=June 18, 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=The seer and the sisters|work=The Independent on Sunday|location=London|date=October 15, 1995|access-date=December 13, 2019}}</ref><ref>''Project Syndicate'' [http://www.project-syndicate.org/columnist/naomi-wolf "The Next Wave."] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141011122129/http://www.project-syndicate.org/columnist/naomi-wolf |date=October 11, 2014 }}</ref><ref>Wolf, Naomi. ''The Beauty Myth''. New York: Bantham Doubleday Dell Publishing, 1991; p. 281: "The beauty myth can be defeated only through an electric resurgence of the woman-centered political activism of the seventies—a feminist third wave—updated to take on the new issues of the nineties ... I've become convinced that here are thousands of young women ready and eager to join forces with a peer-driven feminist third wave that would take on, along with the classic feminist agenda, the new problems that have arisen with the shift in Zeitgeist and beauty backlash."</ref> ''The New York Times'' named it "one of the seventy most influential books of the twentieth century".<ref name="huffpo-blog"/><ref name=NYToneof70mostinfluential>{{cite book|last=Felder|first=Deborah|title=A Bookshelf of Our Own: Works that Changed Women's Lives|year= 2006|publisher=Kensington Publishing Corporation|isbn=978-0806527420|pages=274|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=swpp_Eayg4UC&q=New+York+Times%2C+Naomi+Wolf%2CBeauty+Myth%2C+one+of+the+most+important+books+of+the+twentieth+century&pg=PA274|access-date=June 26, 2015}}</ref> She argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely [[Social construction|socially constructed]], and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the objective to maintain women's subjugation.<ref>{{cite news|last=Johnson|first=Diane|author-link=Diane Johnson|url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/01/16/something-for-the-boys/|title=Something for the Boys|work=The New York Review of Books|date=January 16, 1992|access-date=November 18, 2019|archive-date=August 4, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200804080335/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/01/16/something-for-the-boys/|url-status=live}}</ref>

Wolf proposes the concept of an "iron maiden", an intrinsically unreachable norm that is then used to physically and mentally punish women for failing to achieve and adhere to it. She condemns the fashion and beauty industries for exploiting women, but also writes that the beauty myth pervades all aspects of human life. Wolf believes that women should have "the freedom to do anything we choose with our faces and bodies without being penalized by an ideology that uses attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments about women's looks to psychologically and politically destroy us." She claims that the "beauty myth" has targeted women in five areas: labor, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Finally, Wolf advocates for a relaxation of conventional beauty norms.<ref>''The Beauty Myth'', pp. 17–18, 20, 86, 131, 179, 218.</ref> In her introduction, she scaffolds her work upon the achievements of second-wave feminists and offers the following analysis:

{{blockquote|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 ... [D]uring the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty ... [P]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.<ref>''The Beauty Myth.'' p. 10</ref>}}

====Accuracy====
[[Christina Hoff Sommers]] criticized Wolf for publishing the estimate that 150,000 women were dying every year from [[Anorexia nervosa|anorexia]]. Sommers said she traced the source to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, which said it was misquoted; the figure refers to sufferers, not fatalities. Wolf's citation came from a book by Brumberg, who referred to an American Anorexia and Bulimia Association newsletter and misquoted the newsletter. Wolf acknowledged the error and changed it in future editions. Sommers gave an estimate for the number of fatalities in 1990 as 100–400.<ref name="Sommers1995">{{cite book|author=Christina Hoff Sommers|title=Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EIUtJziqIqAC&pg=PA12|year=1995|publisher=Simon and Schuster|isbn=978-0684801568|pages=12–13}}</ref><ref name="ScienceOfEatingDisorders2012">{{cite news|last=Pekars|first=Tetanya|title=Naomi Wolf Got Her Facts Wrong. Really, Really, Really Wrong|newspaper=Science of Eating Disorders|url=http://www.scienceofeds.org/2012/06/07/naomi-wolf-got-her-facts-wrong/|date=June 7, 2012|access-date=October 1, 2016|archive-date=February 7, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170207041007/http://www.scienceofeds.org/2012/06/07/naomi-wolf-got-her-facts-wrong/|url-status=dead}}</ref> The annual anorexia casualties in the U.S. were estimated to be around 50 to 60 per year in the mid-1990s.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/books/review-outrages-naomi-wolf.html|title=Naomi Wolf's Career of Blunders Continues in 'Outrages'|last=Sehgal|first=Parul|author-link=Parul Sehgal|date=June 5, 2019|work=The New York Times|access-date=June 9, 2019|issn=0362-4331|archive-date=June 9, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190609024216/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/books/review-outrages-naomi-wolf.html|url-status=live}}</ref> In 1995, for an article in ''[[The Independent|The Independent on Sunday]]'', British journalist [[Joan Smith]] recalled asking Wolf to explain her unsourced assertion in ''The Beauty Myth'' that the UK "has 3.5 million anorexics or bulimics (95 per cent of them female), with 6,000 new cases yearly". Wolf replied, according to Smith, that she had calculated the statistics from patients with eating disorders at one clinic.<ref name="Sindy1995" />

Caspar Schoemaker of the Netherlands Trimbos Institute published a paper in the academic journal ''Eating Disorders'' demonstrating that of the 23 statistics cited by Wolf in ''Beauty Myth'', 18 were incorrect, with Wolf citing numbers that average out to 8 times the number in the source she was citing.<ref name="LieFactor">{{cite journal |last1=Schoemaker |first1=Casper |title=A Critical Appraisal of the Anorexia Statistics in The Beauty Myth: Introducing Wolf's Overdo and Lie Factor |journal=Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention|date=2004 |volume=12 |issue=2 |pages=97–102 |doi=10.1080/10640260490444619 |pmid=16864310 |s2cid=8704509 }}</ref>

====Reception====
[[Second-wave feminism|Second-wave feminist]] [[Germaine Greer]] wrote that ''The Beauty Myth'' was "the most important feminist publication since ''[[The Female Eunuch]]''" (Greer's own work), and [[Gloria Steinem]] wrote, "''The Beauty Myth'' is a smart, angry, insightful book, and a clarion call to freedom. Every woman should read it."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780385423977-7 |title=The Beauty Myth|publisher=Powells.com|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110629041335/http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780385423977-7|archive-date=June 29, 2011|url-status=dead}}</ref> British novelist [[Fay Weldon]] called the book "essential reading for the New Woman".<ref name=peopleMagazine>Kim Hubbard, [http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20115393,00.html The Tyranny of Beauty, To Naomi Wolf, Pressure to Look Good Equals Oppression] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303194421/http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20115393,00.html |date=March 3, 2016 }}, ''[[People (American magazine)|People]]'', June 24, 1991.</ref> [[Betty Friedan]] wrote in ''Allure'' magazine that "''The Beauty Myth'' and the controversy it is eliciting could be a hopeful sign of a new surge of feminist consciousness."

[[Camille Paglia]], whose ''[[Sexual Personae]]'' was published the same year as ''The Beauty Myth'', derided Wolf as unable to perform "historical analysis" and called her education "completely removed from reality".<ref>Paglia, Camille. ''Sex, Art, and American Culture.'' New York: Random House, 1992. p. 262</ref> These comments touched off a series of debates between Wolf and Paglia in the pages of ''[[The New Republic]]''.<ref>Naomi Wolf. "Feminist Fatale". ''The New Republic''. March 16, 1992. pp. 23–25</ref><ref>Camille Paglia. [https://web.archive.org/web/20141017203234/http://business.highbeam.com/4776/article-1G1-12037599/feminist-fatale-reply-camille-paglia "Wolf Pack."] ''The New Republic''. April 13, 1992. pp. 4–5</ref><ref>Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia. "The Last Words." ''The New Republic''. May 18, 1992. pp. 4–5</ref>

[[Caryn James]] wrote in ''The New York Times'':<blockquote>No other work has so forcefully confronted the anti-feminism that emerged during the conservative, yuppified 1980's,<!-- sic --> or so honestly depicted the confusion of accomplished women who feel emotionally and physically tortured by the need to look like movie stars. Even by the standards of pop-cultural feminist studies, ''The Beauty Myth'' is a mess, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.<ref name=JamesReview>{{cite news|last=James|first=Caryn|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/07/books/critic-s-notebook-feminine-beauty-as-a-masculine-plot.html|title=Feminine Beauty as a Masculine Plot|work=The New York Times|date=May 7, 1991|access-date=April 29, 2021|archive-date=April 29, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210429144523/https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/07/books/critic-s-notebook-feminine-beauty-as-a-masculine-plot.html|url-status=live}}</ref></blockquote> James also wrote that the book's "claims of an intensified anti-feminism are plausible, but Ms. Wolf doesn't begin to prove them because her logic is so lame, her evidence so easily knocked down."<ref name=JamesReview /> [[Marilyn Yalom]] in ''[[The Washington Post]]'' called the book "persuasive" and praised its "accumulated evidence".<ref>{{cite news|last=Yalom|first=Marilyn|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1991/06/16/feminisms-latest-makeover/53f364f0-0094-448c-9cd6-77bda8ae86ad/|title=Feminism's Latest Makeover|newspaper=The Washington Post|date=June 16, 1991|access-date=May 20, 2022}}</ref>

Revisiting ''The Beauty Myth'' in 2019 for ''The New Republic'', literary critic [[Maris Kreizman]] recalls that reading it as an undergraduate made her "world burst open", but as she matured, Kreizman saw Wolf's books as "poorly argued tracts" with Wolf making "wilder and wilder assertions" over time. Kreizman "began to write [Wolf] off as a fringe character" despite the fact that she had "once informed my own feminism so deeply."<ref name="KreizmanWolf" />