The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf
It is both comforting and depressing to read a book like The Beauty Myth that was published more than 30 years ago: on the one hand, it is strengthening to be able to identify with the problems written about so many years ago and know that someone else not only knew about them, but also wrote a whole book about them. On the other hand, those same problems have improved very little in the last 30 years, and in some cases, have even worsened, especially in these last 5 years or so. Her basic premise is that after the patriarchy and its related systems could no longer keep (Western) women in the home, they needed another way to control women, and that the beauty myth was it. They made women believe that out inherent worth is in youth and thinness, and that we should always be striving toward those two things. We have seen this throughout the years, but especially today, with people taking weight loss drugs and injecting themselves with botox. In this way, what Wolf talked about in the early 90s has indeed become worse in the intervening years, and similar to what she believed, we are at a crossroads today, and we need to move feminism forward. Wolf wrote that we were in need of a third wave – at the end of her book, it is her one and only suggestion for how to move forward and carry on the work of the many women before us, not just as a group, but also individually: “A woman wins when she feels that what each woman does with her own body – unforced, uncoerced – is her own business. When many individual women exempt themselves from the economy, it will begin to dissolve.” This how I try to live my life, and Wolf’s advice on how to begin is to be “shameless” – I love it.
She Will Soar, edited by Ana Sampson
Every so often I try to read some poetry as a brain exercise. I can’t say that I always enjoy it, or even understand it, but still I try! I think, honestly, I just read too fast to fully appreciate poetry, and it is hard for me to slow down to read poem after poem. In this collection, however, I did find quite a few lines that I really loved, including ‘I smelt the smell of distance / And longed for another existence’, ‘and it’s all you can do / not to weep in the face of chance’, and ‘For a moment / you are there, in the other country, knowing its name’. The collection is divided into themes such as courage and resilience, feeling free, wanderlust, the power of words, and silence and tranquility, and include poems from a wide range of poets – from Sappho to Sylvia Plath to Gabriela Mistral and many, many more.