Mirror, Mirror on the Wall who’s the fairest of them all? The Beauty Myth Busted.

           The Article The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf explores how women have evolved in society. While they have fought for freedom and equality with the feminist movement and fought for the right to vote and have rights over their own bodies and the like, they still remain shackled in society by male dominance. Women while achieving so much like becoming prime ministers, doctors , lawyers etc still have not been able to break the glass ceiling. They still have to justify their existence and are criticized for not being married or if married not bearing children. If they bear children they are criticized for leaving the children in daycare and when they return home they are expected to be superwomen who look after home and hearth. Men have none of these pressures. So women have not yet reached true freedom and are bound by archaic almost stone age ideals that women are the home makers and have a limited use to society. On top of all this women have beauty to contend with. Men want to keep women in their place and dominate them by giving them insecurities and competition among their peers to deal with which is propagated by images in the media. A woman may become an executive but her most pressing thought when she wakes up is to check the scales and wonder if she can afford to eat that doughnut. While men spend a minimum amount of time on getting dressed a woman has to apply war paint before she can face the world. A woman needs to be beautiful and present her best face forward to be of value. A woman needs to be sexually attractive to hook a man where a man can be hardly the stereotype of good looks or charms he just need to be successful with a big checkbook to secure women by his side. Are women at fault here, that they put so much value on their looks, or are they simply victims.? Well the other side of the coin is that beautiful women are often not taken seriously. It as if genetics has deposed that a woman can only be blessed with brains or beauty but never both. Darwin would tell you this is not the case but at times a beautiful woman feels she can rely on her looks alone and lets her brains fall by the wayside thus helping to propagate the myth. If women are feminists they are portrayed as ugly, butch and man haters and possibly lesbians. When these women protest against the demeaning of women in beauty contests, society wonders why beautiful women never protest with banners. Why is it the ugly stereotype that does not possess the beauty in the first place protest ?  Again does this stem down to competition, jealousy and of course insecurity. Women have a cross to bear and are always fearful of their lack of perfection or losing their looks to age. Images are plastered on billboards of youth, beauty and vitality, creations of Photoshop. And yet women fall for this fantasy and dream of attaining this perfection, thereby losing self control and self esteem. And yet men are allowed to age gracefully and even are described as distinguished in old age while women are has been old hags. Biology plays a part as men remain fertile into old age while women fight a biological clock. As long as you are fertile, you are both desirable and of use to society. Menopause signals that women need to be sent out to retirement homes and so women fight the clock, preserve youth by any means and of course lie about their age. Instead women should be celebrating that the burden of female problems has ended with menopause and herald a new era in liberation. Older men on the other hand are thought of as being socially and financially stable and sexually experienced and therefore age like old wine but women age like withered up peaches. Were men threatened by women’s freedom and liberties that have fought so hard to obtain that they created the obstacle of beauty, to reassure and maintain their dominance? And when will women stop asking themselves, “mirror, mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?”