Beauty Myth (Wolf) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—November 12, 1962
• Where—San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; Oxford University, England
  (Rhode Scholar)
• Currently—lives in New York, NY


At a relatively young age, Naomi Wolf became literary star of what was later described as the "third-wave" of the feminist movement and she is also known for her advocacy of progressive politics.

She became famous because of her first book The Beauty Myth (1991), which became an international bestseller. In the book, she attacked what she characterized as the exploitation of women by the fashion and beauty industries. Wolf argued that women deserve "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically." The book examines five areas in which Wolf believed women were under assault by the beauty myth: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger.

Wolf's book became an overnight bestseller, garnering not only praise from feminists but from the public and mainstream media. Second-wave feminist Germaine Greer wrote that The Beauty Myth was "the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch." British novelist Fay Weldon called the book "a vivid and impassioned polemic, essential reading for the New Woman."

Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach "soccer moms" and other female voters. During Al Gore's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf's ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time magazine, "Wolf [was] paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations." This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore's "three-buttoned, earth-toned look." The Duffy article did not mention "earth tones."

The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is "a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office". In an interview with Melinda Henneberger in the New York Times, Wolf denied ever advising Gore on his wardrobe. Wolf herself claimed she mentioned the term "alpha male" only once in passing and that "it was just a truism, something the pundits had been saying for months, that the vice president is in a supportive role and the President is in an initiatory role...I used those terms as shorthand in talking about the difference in their job descriptions."

Departing from the anti-pornography emphasis of such second-wave feminist writers as Andrea Dworkin, Wolf suggested in 2003 that the ubiquity of Internet pornography tends to make males less libidinous toward typical real females. She later followed up on this theme with the assertion that Saturday-night parties with significant alcohol consumption tended toward an increase in one-night stands, which she refers to as "hooking up." (From Wikipedia.)