How would you summarise The Beauty Myth as a term? What does that mean? Essentially, once I saw my thesis, I saw examples everywhere. Doctors were getting insurance because the implants ruptured so often, right, but they weren’t telling their patients. For example, supermodels, or the breast implants which were being promoted in women’s magazines with no warning or caveats at that time – no studies.

Now, in the twentieth century, I could see among my own friends and myself that there was a similar backlash to women’s liberation, but it had morphed into these very rigid, thin beauty ideals - perfect, computer-enhanced images to which we were asked to be enslaved.

Then later, when Betty Friedan was writing, the perfect housewife became the unattainable ideal. This wasn’t totally new: I’d studied in Oxford the nineteenth century and knew the first wave of feminists were struggling against a different set of norms imposed on them - the idea of woman was that doll-like, silent, tiny, child-like being. It drained their energies, so we weren’t as politically motivated as we should have been. I had just left Oxford, a good university with really smart young women around me who were overwhelmingly preoccupied with an obsession about their weight or their body or their appearance. I used to wander these streets figuring out my thesis. Naomi Wolf: As the best of feminism teaches, there is no distinction! I would say it was both personal and academic and political. To start with, if you can cast your mind back to 1990, why did you decide to write this book? Was it personal or political? She was 28 when she wrote it, and I am 28 now, so we decided to have a conversation about how pressures for women to be ‘beautiful’ or ‘sexy’ have changed between our generations, and how much of her famous first book still rings true. Today, more than half a dozen books later (most recently, Outrages, about sex and censorship in 19th century Britain), Naomi is sitting across from me in a cafe in Edinburgh, the city where she wrote The Beauty Myth 28 years ago. “An ideology that makes women feel ‘worth less’ was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more.” Gloria Steinem praised the book, while the likes of Camille Paglia criticised it heavily. “Western economies are absolutely dependent on the continued underpayment of women,” she wrote in the introduction. It cleverly traced the links between patriarchy, the ideals peddled in contemporary advertising and pornography and increased pressures for women to get surgery alongside rising numbers of eating disorder diagnoses. In 1991, feminist scholar Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, a big and bold work of nonfiction that put to paper the oppressive beauty ideals of the day.

The beauty myth author