Normalizin Wolf Summary

Proof of this is women becoming more free during the

Jennings 6

Counterculture of the 1960s, but also Playboy rising in popularity at the same time. Wolf is sure to clarify that sexual explicitness is not the issue at hand. The real issue lies in the interpretation of what sexual explicitness is. She argues that if the full spectrum of erotic images were shown with no censor, beauty pornography would be harmless. Instead, we are fed images of “living mannequins, made to contort and grimace, immobilized, and uncomfortable under hot lights” (136). These explicit images reveal nothing about female sexuality. Through the exploration of various parts of sexuality and the beauty myth, Wolf makes her most prominent idea clear, which is that the myth intends to “discourage women from seeing themselves unequivocally as sexually beautiful” (147). As women became more liberated and open to explore their sexuality, unrealistic standards for how a woman should be sexual were forming. Wolf critiques rock music for

Anecdote is used as a rhetorical device when she gives her personal testimony of her own experience with anorexia. By using an anecdote, she shows the reader that she is not only looking at the beauty myth as some type of outsider, but that it enveloped her at one point. She profoundly describes adolescence as “a prolonged reluctance to be born into woman if that meant assuming a station of beauty” (203). She makes it clear how unfair it is that men are encouraged to eat during this time while women are discouraged. A young woman would have more energy if she did eat, but she would also be chastised. Wolf eloquently states this by saying that, “with ample stores of sugar to set off the buzz for intellectual exploration, starch to convert into restlessness in her elongating legs, fat to fuel her sexual curiosity, and the fearlessness born from a lack of concern over where her next meal will come from—she will get in trouble”