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The Anti-Beauty Myth
- Abstract
American women spend 15 minutes more each day on “personal grooming” than American men do. If this fact, gleaned from time-use studies, elicits a shrug rather than a surge of self-righteous indignation, you probably have not been following the ongoing feminist effort to punish pulchritude. Ever since Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth nearly 20 years ago, feminist writers have been trying to come to grips with the enduring female interest in beauty. After decades of academic theorizing, endless denunciations of the diet and cosmetics industries, and annual attacks on the “heteronormativity” of the typical beauty pageant, they have yet to wrest ladies’ lipsticks from their manicured hands.
The latest self-styled beauty muckraker is Stanford University law professor Deborah Rhode, whose new book, The Beauty Bias, is subtitled The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. Rhode argues that civil-rights law should be extended to include discrimination based on appearance. “Conventional wisdom understates the advantages that attractiveness confers, the costs of its pursuit, and the injustices that result,” Rhode writes. She cites as evidence of the problem cases like that of a cocktail waitress held to draconian makeup standards and a woman denied a Jazzercise franchise because she was overweight.
About the Author
Christine Rosen, a senior editor at the New Atlantis magazine, last wrote for us about the Obama administration’s efforts to change the behavior of Americans (“Now Behave,” July/August).
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