Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The critical perspective that has become known as the critique of the beauty myth - what Susan Brownmiller calls the "tyranny of Venus" - represents one of the critical cornerstones of Second Wave Feminism. However, in Fresh Lipstick, Linda Scott argues that the line of inquiry has become more than a commonplace and instead has itself become an industry. Moreover, she finds that several developments in feminist thought, and especially the rise of key personalities as intertexts, obscures the puritanical roots of North American feminism. Quite simply, Indeed, Scott suggests that while the findings of the "beauty myth" critique can be repeated in the current cultural setting, this is not a reflection of the power of the argument but rather suggests that it has not achieved a redress, as it were, of the situation. Indeed, the coquettish behaviour of key figures not only contradicts but also hampers the very effort. In this way, Scott challenges the iconicity of "celebrity feminists" Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, among others, as contradictory to their purported message (6). At the same time Scott demonstrates that Betty Friedan, as leader of Second Wave charge against fashion - a charge allegedly based on her own lack of beauty - helped foster the myth of the superwoman in the very masculinized business suit.
Repository Citation
Ouellette, Marc. "Review of Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism, by Linda M. Scott." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss1/63