ge woman." Yea, right!The Beauty Myth standard of the "perfect" weight is especially interesting to explore. If you watch a movie made before 1970 you'll see what I mean. Women and girls shown in the hottest, cutting-edge movies of the 50s and 60s actually have hips and a fanny!!! They actually look like real women!!! Judged by today's standards, we look at these movies and think that the women in them look a little fat. It's striking to notice that the beautiful women shown in movies and TV these days never have round, feminine, bottoms and thighs. We've all been trained to believe that this boyish silhouette is the way healthy women should look, but the reality is that healthy women rarely, if ever, look this way.The attitude portrayed by the media in the 80s and 90s "includes and aspirational, individualist, can-do tone that says that you should be your best and nothing should get in your way." This attitude contributes to women's guilt about their bodies by saying that if you don't look "perfect" you have only yourself to blame: If you don't look as gaunt as the fashion models, then you should starve or exercise to get that way; if you have lines on your face, you should have them cut or burned off; if your breasts are small, inject them with chemicals; if your thighs are round, have a doctor stick a vacuum cleaner under your skin and suck the fat out. In other words, the culture of today puts incredible pressure on all people, and women in particular, to look "beautiful," whatever that really means. And it maintains that if you don't look perfect, there must be something wrong with your willpower, because if you really wanted to you could.Although most obviously fueled by advertisers, Wolf states that there are political and economic forces that act to maintain this standard. "In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent w...
