Interesting Slate article, via NRO (you know I'd never read Slate if not guided there). Ramesh Ponnuru points out, "Laura Kipnis is not being wry in the following sentence, which is what makes it so amusing: 'For some reason, the majority of women simply would not give up the pursuit of beautification, even those armed with feminist theory.'" More:
Take the chapter by anthropologist Rebecca Popenoe, based on her fieldwork among desert Arabs in Niger. This is a society with no media influences or beauty industries, where women strive to be as fat as possible. Girls are force-fed to achieve this ideal; stretch marks are regarded as beautiful. Yet somehow this beauty norm doesn't create the same sense of anguish that afflicts Western women striving for thinness, leading Popenoe to suggest that it's the Western obsession with individualism and achievement that bears the blame—not media images, not a top-down backlash against feminism, as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth has it. In Niger, failing to achieve the prevailing beauty standard isn't a personal failure; it just means someone has bewitched you, or you have a thin constitution.
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