Women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before in todays world. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book. Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Want to learn the ideas in The Beauty Myth better than ever? Read the worlds #1 book summary of The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf here. The Beauty Myth Book Summary By Naomi Wolf Not for me and not for the women I know and admire. I look around at the magnetic and dynamic women my own age, I look at my own life, and instead that script seems more like a convenient fiction designed, as so many aspects of the beauty myth are, to make women feel less powerful in this case, just when their power, magnetism and sexuality are at their height.īut I am coming out with this and hope that many midlife women will join me: Those pangs of loss have largely not happened.

Middle-aged women are supposed to face the loss of their youthful selves with grief and anguish. The common cultural script tells us that women lose value as they age and that men will trade in their counterparts for younger versions.

I had thought that getting older would be harder. The man may have imagined that he was showing off the youth of his date the way he might show off a new Maserati but parading her around like an acquisition seemed only to make his friends feel sorry for him. In fact, the mood of both genders was tender, almost pitying.

And yet I did not feel the frisson of envy among the men present, nor did I see a bristle of jealousy from any of the stylish, accomplished women in their 40s. It took only a few moments of conversation before the rest of the group realized that the two had very little in common. Recently, I was at a party, and a man who, like myself, was in his late 40s, arrived with a woman 20 years younger.

Author of the beauty myth