Western civilization offers no more commonplace or tedious litany than the conversation between a man and a woman in which the latter has encountered a nasty shock on the weighing scales. In vain he sympathises, as she proceeds from incredulity to rage and self pity. Struggling, he observes that she is gloriously unchanged, only to be reproached for his inattentiveness. Despairing, he utters exactly the wrong phrase, ‘But I like you as you are’, demonstrating conclusively that she is, in fact, obese. The man cannot win. The fat’s in the fire, so to speak.

Naomi Wolfs laudable ambition is to explain why such an impasse occurs, why women apparently dedicate themselves to an ideal of beauty newly and mysteriously devised each season, passively suffering judgement based on these standards in their professional and social lives as though it was quite legitimate. Her argument is that Second Wave feminism has been systematically undermined by a cynically cultivated myth of beauty which keeps women from power and freedom, and she puts it even more passionately than precursors such as Greer and Friedan. We are not just pondering trivial phenomena here – women insistently vying for the role of ugliest or fattest in town, gawping wistfully at models who have been airbrushed to within an inch of fantasy or tinkering with puffs, powders and patches in the effort to resemble such templates. This is the age of the Professional Beauty Qualification – the dimple that gets you the job, the cellulite that disqualifies; of the Holy Oil that redeems you; of the scalpel that transforms. Beauty transacts into a fee paid for power. The myth of beauty operates in the market place like the arms trade: the more beauty one woman has, the greater the escalation of treatments another must purchase. Multinational technology renders lanolin obsolete when you can have renutrient protective barriers; corsets are out when you can get diet pills. Wolfs belief is that ‘the really crucial function that women serve as aspiring beauties is to buy more things for the body.’

Something is obviously wrong, of course. A generation ago the average US model weighed only 8% less than the average US woman whereas today she weighs 23% less. When the gap widens, expedient remedies get more extreme: a survey of ten-year-old girls in 1989 shows 81% to be dieters; women consume diuretics, emetics and amphetamines to dissolve the flesh, lug it to a clinic for liposuction or to hospital for amputation; they implant silicon in their breasts until they become rock hard and ludicrous and undergo dermabrasion where the skin is frozen stiff and scarified with wire brushes. There are registered cosmetic surgery addicts in America. They say this engineering is for themselves, their careers, for other women, but never for men. And then the paradox ensues, where men are supposed to stand in as a golden mean.

From the plucking of a brow to the carving of a thigh, the pathology of beauty is determined by sinister forces, according to Wolf. Some are not mysterious – advertising, cinema, literature and women’s magazines receive a thorough, if familiar, analysis, although Wolf has the distinction of style over some commentators – the woman laying down a glossy journal ‘raving, itching, parching with product lust’. But she is preoccupied with more pernicious exploitation of this imagery. ‘Women legally don’t have a thing to wear’ is a powerful sketch of the myriad ways in which a woman can dress wrongly for work according to the establishment, and lose her job or her physical privacy. ‘Beauty pornography’ involves the dangerous overlap of advertising photography and erotica which suggest that a woman will get to feel like the women depicted only if she looks like her.

Her chapter on the skin game is particularly strong: for extortionate outlay you buy redemption through unguent and paint, care where there may be none socially – Empathy shampoo, Kind cleanser, Caress soap, Loving Care cream – even protection from danger – Skin Defender, Protectinol, Damage Limitation. A thousand false prophets tell of rebirth through niosomes, sacrificing sheep and pigs for the use of their cells upon the female altar. The religious metaphor does work hard for its living, but it’s more persuasive than any casual dismissal of the chemist’s counter. Her point is that the beauty industry, like the medieval church, is millenarian: ‘It defers women from living in the body, keeping them waiting for the apotheosis that will never arrive. It keeps them out of their flesh and out of the present, those two erotically and politically dangerous places for a woman to be.’

Although there are some arguable indices of beauty – British women administered oestrogen pills called Mini-Helens assumed a radiance commonly described as beautiful, youth and vitality are everywhere admired – Wolf can never define her terms without contradicting her premise that beauty is a myth. She is forced back upon statistics and case studies to demonstrate the prevalence of this myth, and these are frequently old, often unclear and subject to the same maquillage as the women described. There are astonishing claims: ‘13% of all women have been prostitutes’; ‘21% of all married women are physically abused by their partners’ (where? when? how? what source?); ‘the figures for orgasm among uncircumcised women in the rich world may be lower than the figures for circumcised women in the Arab world’; ‘scar tissue development after breast surgery happens in from one case in ten up to seven cases in ten’. Meaning what? And in this vast range of material, there is a very narrow use of emotive language. Women paying through the nose for a new nose are invariably ‘cut up’ by surgeons, as though they were the victims of Nazi experiments. Girls trying to conform to this year’s model in any way are seen to be impaled by the Iron Maiden. Medical violence and dieting don’t get the best out of Wolf – she is more an essayist than a campaigner. ‘Beauty is generic, status boring. If a woman is born resembling an art object, it’s many things: an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence. What it is not is a moral act.’ ‘The beauty myth gives life itself a compromised meaning: the woman who dies thinnest, with the least wrinkles, wins.’ Her epigrams are always more powerful than her facts.

And there is a critical paradox in the whole thesis. Women starve to death in the pursuit of beauty apparently because the beauty myth determines all society’s value judgements about women. We are not merely shackled to beauty’s mutable ideal of the model so emaciated she no longer menstruates, the page three girl strategically cantilevered with sellotape – we are subjugated by the PBQ and fighting each other as a consequence. Divide and rule used to deny women the power released in Friedan’s era; anxiety as a controlling drug. We wire our jaws together because society dictates it. Wolf is here denying the existence of autonomy while advocating its rights. If I purchase Retin A for my wrinkles and blemishes, I can’t go into direct sunlight without disastrous results. My neighbour takes this purdah for reasons I cannot know, while I may do it because I am revoltingly vain. Wolf cannot generalise without diminishing women’s individuality.

Will this polemic deter me from wasting my wages on a pot of lard which can never possibly penetrate the epidermis and make me beautiful? Could it destroy the perennial fantasy of handing over about fourteen pounds of flesh to any passing Shylock? Despite acknowledging that great changes are needed, this is what she intends and this is what the publisher believes – ‘No woman will diet again, after reading this book.’ Fat chance. I return to my lettuce.