According to a recent and widespread study, it appears that American women have deconstructed thebeauty myth. When I first wrote about the oppressive power of prevailing norms of “the physical ideal” in1991, very few women felt comfortable challenging them. It was taken for granted by audiences with whomI spoke that the ideal was tall, young, thin, blonde, Caucasian, and large-breasted, and that if they fell outsideof this rigid definition of beauty – which they experienced as “a barrage” of images coming at them fromads in magazines and TV commercials – then it was them, not the images, that were at fault. If they onlytried harder, they were told, if they only spent more, exercised more, or even went under the knife, somehow,someday, they might claim “beauty” for their own. Meanwhile, studies in the past repeatedly showed that women just didn’tfeel that good about themselves physically; one landmark study established that women felt a lowered sense of self-esteemwhen they read fashion magazines and saw models than when they did not. In the first edition of The Beauty Myth, asubstantial minority of women said they would rather lose 10 pounds than achieve any other life goal