Mary Wolstonecraft's The Beauty Myth

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Mary Wollstonecraft was a philosopher, writer and a women’s rights advocate. In 1792 she argued that women are ‘slaves to their bodies.’ Today, this statement continues to be relevant. Primarily, In the Second Sex (1986), Simone de Beauvoir discusses how men fundamentally oppress women as unnecessary, inadequate, and damaged by characterizing them as an object and being referred to as the other. Through an ontological view, De Beauvoir explains why their oppression limits a women’s ability to act in society, as their choices are limited, and expectations are restrained due to flawed imbalances in gender roles, and a woman’s body becomes a social text that has been constructed to be read by others. Furthermore, an art critic, painter, poet, …show more content…

The female body tends to be judged and mostly seen as a problem in work organizations, while female bodies are also sexualized to qualify for particular kinds of work such as receptionists, secretaries and nurses (Jackson and Scott, 2002; 150). In Naomi Wolf’s (1990) novel The Beauty Myth, she discusses the belief that is beauty, which is real and universal so that women, as result of biological, sexual, and evolutionary factors should want to be embodied. The Beauty Myth, however, set out to demonstrate that beauty is in fact a myth because there isn’t any true universal and real measure of what beauty is, in result to different cultures and historical time periods having completely changed and often contradicting ideas about what makes something or someone beautiful, and the beauty myth is nearly an unreachable cultural ideal of feminine beauty that “uses images of female beauty as a political women against women’s advancement” (Wolf, 1990; 259). Ultimately, sexual standards of beauty often vary depending on the status of

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