SOURCE: Cranston, Maurice. Review of The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf. American Spectator 24, no. 8 (August 1991): 36–37.

In the following review, Cranston offers a negative assessment of The Beauty Myth.

The Beauty Myth has already caused something of a stir in England and, being English, I think I can understand why. The argument is outrageous, and it is written in a wild and witty way by a glamorous American graduate student, aged 28, who is at Oxford on a “Rhodes scholarship”—that is, with a fellowship endowed by the racist imperialist Cecil Rhodes, although her own views are those of the most radical-feminist left. Like Cecil Rhodes, however, Miss Wolf is rather a bully, and the people she is out to bully are the millions of American women who try to make themselves look pretty. She wants them to stop it.

Miss Wolf's argument is that the male tyrants who rule...