“Our biggest challenge is to change our consciousness.”
– Naomi Wolf

Naomi Wolf, renowned author, feminist and social critic, spoke at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Oct. 19, advocating that images of beauty challenge women’s assertion of power.

In her lecture, “The Beauty Myth Revisited,” she discussed the current state of issues she raised in her first book, “The Beauty Myth,” published 14 years ago.

Wolf said that images of beauty still pose resistance to women’s advancement.

Wolf said that women are used to being underappreciated, so they do not realize their collective accomplishments. She cited the victories of women in the 1990s, including larger female representation in government and strides in women’s issues in domestic and foreign policy.

She said women’s task is to achieve awareness and pride in these achievements and run with them.

“Our biggest challenge is to change our consciousness,” Wolf said. “We need to get it that women are no longer in the co-pilot seat. Women are flying the plane.”

She asked the women in the room what would happen if they walked out of the room knowing they are “beautiful and perfect exactly the way we are.”

She responded by saying they would no longer feel pressured to buy products that are advertisements aimed at making them feel insecure.

In her theory of the beauty myth, she asserts that the unrealistic beauty ideal strengthens each time women gain momentum. Her first example was that when women gained suffrage, the fashionable body type went from being voluptuous to tiny.

Her following correlations were women’s increased size when they returned to the domestic scene in the 1950s, and then the appearance of Twiggy at the advent of the pill.

Prompting the audience to identify the beauty ideal, the audience responded that she is tall, young, white, blonde, large-breasted and skinny. Wolf labeled the ideal “Barbie.”

Wolf said that she was a victim of the unrealistic ideal when she was 13-years-old and struggled with anorexia. She eventually realized that women are not “messed up” when anorexic, but that it is society that makes them feel inadequate.

The first myth she spoke of was that the ideal is natural. She said this is false because it has not always been the same, nor is it the same throughout the world.

“It’s not as if Barbie is floating in a platonic heaven,” Wolf said.

She also said it is untrue that the thin ideal is healthy, saying that infertility is correlated with low body weight.

She said the source of these destructive images that attempt to limit women’s power and diminish their self-worth is the economic interest of the multi-million dollar cosmetic, diet and cosmetic surgery industries.

Wolf’s solution to these pressures is to realize that the beauty myth is just that: a myth. She said that remembering it is fake is like having a “consciousness condom.”

“Now you can have a safe interaction with pop culture,” Wolf said.

She asked the women of the audience to decide for themselves that they are beautiful.

“I’d like you to make a conscious political and social decision to take back the definition of beauty for yourself,” she said. “We are so conditioned to make sure someone else has to say ‘You’re pretty.’ ”

She called each woman to own her beauty.

She said that the ideal is not sexy because it kills intimacy. Because of perfect images displayed in pornography, women often feel they are not sexually valuable and men increasingly need pornography to be aroused.

“Women have compared themselves to images of hundreds of dozens of perfect women before they have a chance to take off their clothes in front of someone they want to become intimate with,” Wolf said.

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