The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf

Author:Naomi Wolf
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780061577260
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-03-01T10:00:00+00:00

Hunger

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving….

—Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

There is a disease spreading. It taps on the shoulder America’s firstborn sons, its best and brightest. At its touch, they turn away from food. Their bones swell out from receding flesh. Shadows invade their faces. They walk slowly, with the effort of old men. A white spittle forms on their lips. They can swallow only pellets of bread, and a little thin milk. First tens, then hundreds, then thousands, until, among the most affluent families, one young son in five is stricken. Many are hospitalized, many die.

The boys of the ghetto die young, and America has lived with that. But these boys are the golden ones to whom the reins of the world are to be lightly tossed: the captain of the Princeton football team, the head of the Berkeley debating club, the editor of the Harvard Crimson. Then a quarter of the Dartmouth rugby team falls ill; then a third of the initiates of Yale’s secret societies. The heirs, the cream, the fresh delegates to the nation’s forum selectively waste away.

The American disease spreads eastward. It strikes young men at the Sorbonne, in London’s Inns of Court, in the administration of The Hague, in the Bourse, in the offices of Die Zeit, in the universities of Edinburgh and Tübingen and Salamanca. They grow thin and still more thin. They can hardly speak aloud. They lose their libido, and can no longer make the effort to joke or argue. When they run or swim, they look appalling: buttocks collapsed, tailbones protruding, knees knocked together, ribs splayed in a shelf that stretches their papery skin. There is no medical reason.

The disease mutates again. Across America, it becomes apparent that for every well-born living skeleton there are at least three other young men, also bright lights, who do something just as strange. Once they have swallowed their steaks and Rhine wine, they hide away, to thrust their fingers down their throats and spew out all the nourishment in them. They wander back into Maury’s or “21,” shaking and pale. Eventually they arrange their lives so they can spend hours each day hunched over like that, their highly trained minds telescoped around two shameful holes: mouth, toilet; toilet, mouth.

Meanwhile, people are waiting for them to take up their places: assistantships at The New York Times, seats on the stock exchange, clerkships with federal judges. Speeches need to be written and briefs researched among the clangor of gavels and the whir of fax machines. What is happening to the fine young men, in their brush cuts and khaki trousers? It hurts to look at them. At the expense-account lunches, they hide their medallions of veal under lettuce leaves. Secretly they purge. They vomit after matriculation banquets and after tailgate parties at the Game. The men’s room in the Oyster Bar reeks with it. One in five, on the campuses that speak their own names proudest.

How would America react to the

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