EXAMPLE OF BOOK REVIEW AND COMMENTARY ON HOW IT WORKS
(taken from The New York Times on the Web)
| THE REVIEW ITSELF 'Does Your Flesh Wobble and Seem Dimpled?' Date: May 19, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Margo Jefferson; THE BEAUTY MYTH How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. By Naomi Wolf. 348 pp. New York: William Morrow & Company. $21.95. I am gazing at a glossy, full-color, seven-page advertisement for a new line of cosmetics produced by Ultima II, a division of Revlon sold mostly in department stores. They are called the Nakeds II. The Nakeds offer "HUNDREDS OF SHADES IN EVERY NUANCE OF NEUTRAL . . . FOR WHENEVER A WOMAN WANTS THE LOOK OF LESS FOR SATURDAY" (she's likely to be around trees, bushes and other naturalistic props), "THE LOOK OF MORE FOR WORK" (more money, more competence, hence more facial armature), "OR FOR EVENING, THE LOOK OF WOW!" ("Apply 2 coats of black mascara. Brush the blush in 'Bashful' on apples of cheeks. . . . Line lips with lipliner in 'Smooch.' "). It's utterly ridiculous -- still, I can't help liking the packaging, those cream-colored makeup containers with black piping that so resemble ladies' hatboxes in the photograph on the three-page foldout. But that's my weakness, and it's there to be played on. How could it be otherwise, Naomi Wolf asks in "The Beauty Myth," a sweeping, messy, vigorous, callow but stouthearted book dedicated to the proposition that the icon of the educated, middle-class woman as wife, mother and tasteful sexual appliance has been replaced by the icon of the educated, middle-class, wage-earning woman as a flaw-free specimen of physical perfection. The operative principle here is that no society ever rights a wrong without finding a new one to put in its place: ours, having yielded ground on matters of social, political, economic and sexual freedom for women, dug in its heels when faced with the more psychologically nuanced issues of female beauty, desirability and self-esteem. Ms. Wolf, a graduate of Yale who is now a Rhodes scholar at New College, Oxford, believes that from the Cult of Domesticity to the Feminine Mystique to the Beauty Myth and its backlash -- that is, over the past 35 years -- "inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work took over from inexhaustible but ephemeral housework. As the economy, law, religion, sexual mores, education, and culture were forcibly opened up to include women more fairly, a private reality colonized female consciousness. By using ideas about 'beauty,' it reconstructed an alternative female world with its own laws, economy, religion, sexuality, education, and culture, each element as repressive as any that had gone before." Ms. Wolf maps out this "alternative female world" by recording just about every form of obsession and exploitation a $20 billion-a-year cosmetics industry, a $33 billion diet industry, a $300 million cosmetic-surgery industry and a $7 billion pornography industry can nurture and supply. There's the language of upwardly mobile beauty and fitness, austere one moment, sweetly lascivious the next: packed with technological intimidation (makeup containing mock-scientific ingredients such as "reticulin and mucopolysaccharides") and with born-again bullying ("Take the shades from your eyes and face the truth of the situation," says one ad. "Does your flesh wobble and seem dimpled?"). There are the women who take cosmetic surgery to she-devil lengths of pain and desperation, and the many more who empty their pocketbooks daily to look like any and everyone but themselves. There is anorexia and there is bulimia: anorexia alone is said to kill 150,000 American women each year; together with bulimia it afflicts one million a year. Is this new information? No (as Ms. Wolf's plentiful footnotes verify), but it is information we keep refusing to process, and we must be reminded of it until we begin to do so. As a feminist muckraker and media critic, Naomi Wolf does her work well. But as a feminist cultural historian, she has two big problems. The first is the intellectual equivalent of beauty follies. She overdoes glittery, special-effect metaphors -- beauty as the cult millenarianism; beauty as the Iron Maiden, a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and face of a young woman that served as a medieval instrument of torture. She is also addicted to cosmetic touch-ups of her thesis in the form of brief quotations and one-liners from critics, scholars and poets through the ages. I'll put the second problem in question form: Why does every generation frame its recognition of lies and injustice in the claim that no previous generation has ever suffered them so acutely? I believe Ms. Wolf when she writes that "today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman." But I don't believe this is taking place "for the first time in history": it's taking place at this moment in history through the particular methods that media and technology provide. After all, the conventions, excesses and grotesqueries of the beauty industry were securely in place by the 1920's, from the pseudoscientific jargon and faux intime exhortations to the carelessly regulated health and safety standards to the ties that bind advertisers to women's magazines. As for beauty standards -- from body shape to feature size -- they were a lot more restrictive and bigoted just 25 years ago than they are now, and while Ms. Wolf is right to say that the muscled and worked body in fashion today has its alien and bionic side, the 1950's exaggeration of "natural" female flesh and curves was just as artificial and (if you lacked them) debilitating. One body canonized pseudowomanliness; the other appropriates pseudomanliness. Beauty is such a strange thing -- it's a fantasy, a pastime and a profession (like sports), and we bring a daunting range of emotions and associations to it. I like the fact that Ms. Wolf ends her book by saying we need more, not less of it. "The beauty myth is harmful and pompous and grave because so much, too much, depends upon it," she writes: we should treat it (and we do, sometimes) like theater and play. "The Beauty Myth" shows us yet again how much we need new ways of seeing. I regret that it also shows how much we need new ways of writing -- polemics and manifestoes that will make room amidst their facts and theories for the contradictory particulars of each reader's life. |
WHAT THE REVIEWER DOES Pulls the reader in through a description of beauty products that captures the ridiculousness of them--and leads into the main idea of Wolf’s book. Pronounces judgment Summarizes
the central idea of Wolf's book. Notice how the reviewer assumes that we have NOT
read the book. |