The core of Wolf's argument was that during the 1980s, just as the second-wave feminist movement had succeeded in winning greater equality for women in postsecondary education and the workplace, the pressure on women to meet impossible standards of thinness and beauty had increased sharply, putting them at a competitive disadvantage with men in their fields. This was no coincidence, she argued. “The ruling elite” knew, Wolf wrote, that they held jobs that would be at risk if women were free to rise unencumbered, something that “must be thwarted, or the traditional power elite will be at a disadvantage.” The “myth” of beauty was invented, she speculated, to drain women's power and focus—to keep them busy with mascara and starvation diets instead of free to climb the professional ladder and outcompete their male rivals. In essence, she posed the heightened beauty standards of the 1980s as a backlash to the feminism of the 1970s.

QUESTION: Wolf's conspiracy-flavored theory that beauty standards intentionally throttled women's advancement is provocative but hard to verify — worth interrogating the evidence base. XREF: Connects to broader backlash-thesis literature on periods of feminist advance followed by cultural retrenchment.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 62