Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth takes on the backlash against the women’s movement which is embodied in the view of women as possessing worth in direct ratio to their possession of beauty. It is an urgent, angry book and the subject merits the urgency and the anger. But it is also a poorly written book in many respects and Wolf often does her subject a great disservice. Any reader who is already as angry about the subject as Wolf will simply have her/his ideas confirmed. That audience already understands Wolf’s basic premises and, while there is much to be learned here even for those most interested in the subject, she is essentially preaching to an already converted audience. But there are also a great number of potential readers who do not engage in the same analytic and critical processes that Wolf and her already-converted audience use to arrive at these…