"'Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact"
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Calling beauty a "currency system" is Naomi Wolf at her most strategically blunt: she doesn’t argue that beauty is merely subjective or oppressive, she argues it’s infrastructural. The gold-standard comparison is a shrewd provocation because it frames attractiveness as something treated as objective, scarce, and self-evidently valuable even though it’s upheld by collective agreement and institutional power. Gold only has authority because states, banks, and believers decide it does; "beauty" only disciplines because media, workplaces, peers, and romantic markets keep pricing women in it.
Wolf’s intent is to move the conversation away from individual insecurity (the privatized shame of "not feeling pretty enough") and toward governance. If beauty functions like money, then it’s not an aesthetic preference but a system of allocation: who gets attention, safety, employment, credibility, desire. That’s why the phrase "determined by politics" matters. Standards shift with race, class, and age not by accident, but because those shifts reward compliance and punish deviation in ways that are legible to institutions.
The sharpest subtext is in "the last, best belief system". Wolf is suggesting that as overt legal and economic exclusions become harder to justify in liberal democracies, beauty ideology remains a socially acceptable way to reintroduce hierarchy while calling it "personal choice" or "self-care". It’s not just that beauty norms harm women; it’s that they keep women busy, spending, comparing, and self-surveilling - a quiet tax that preserves male dominance without needing a law or a sermon.
Wolf’s intent is to move the conversation away from individual insecurity (the privatized shame of "not feeling pretty enough") and toward governance. If beauty functions like money, then it’s not an aesthetic preference but a system of allocation: who gets attention, safety, employment, credibility, desire. That’s why the phrase "determined by politics" matters. Standards shift with race, class, and age not by accident, but because those shifts reward compliance and punish deviation in ways that are legible to institutions.
The sharpest subtext is in "the last, best belief system". Wolf is suggesting that as overt legal and economic exclusions become harder to justify in liberal democracies, beauty ideology remains a socially acceptable way to reintroduce hierarchy while calling it "personal choice" or "self-care". It’s not just that beauty norms harm women; it’s that they keep women busy, spending, comparing, and self-surveilling - a quiet tax that preserves male dominance without needing a law or a sermon.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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