Should We Starve Naomi Wolf Analysis

I knew my parents wanted me not to starve because they loved me; but their love contradicted the message of the larger world, which wanted me to starve in order to love me. It is the larger world’s messages, young women know, to which they will have to listen if they are to leave their parents’ protection. I kept a wetted finger up to the winds of that larger world: Too thin yet? I was asking it. What about now? No? Now?The larger world never gives girls the message that their bodies are valuable simply because they are inside them. Until our culture tells young girls that they are welcome in any shape – that women are valuable to it with or without the excuse of “beauty” – girls will continue to starve.In this, her first book, Naomi Wolf examines
Too tired and distracted to be successful at work, and too tired and distracted to become involved or even interested in unions or other political action that might help to change the situation. The beauty myth also serves an important function in undermining women’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem, so as to reduce their aspirations, ambitions and expectations to what the system can cope
People die. (Remember this 20 year old young woman?) Other bad stuff happens all the time. Surgery is dangerous. Sometimes it is even experimental. And doctors – doctors, who must promise first and foremost to do no harm – are carrying out unnecessary and dangerous procedures without any real regulation and with no real protection for the vulnerable women who are seeking a private, surgical solution to what is so clearly a public, social problem. Wolf compares the modern vogue for breast surgery with female genital mutilation, and with the cliterodectomies and oophorectomies (removal of clitoris and ovaries respectively) of the Victorian era. These last two were procedures routinely performed to remedy such illnesses as masturbation, adultery, or just plain uppitiness. These days, we see the rise of cosmetic surgery to the vulva