One thing that has always amused me about certain cultural “truths” is how there is often nothing true at all about them. I remember interviewing many people—young and old, male and female, gay and straight—in the 1990s about their conceptions of beauty using the model of 1970’s beauty standards and iconography from the US television program, Charlie’s Angels. I was surprised to learn that the majority of my subjects found that they deemed the most beautiful “angel” to be Kate Jackson, not Jaclyn Smith nor Farrah Fawcett as most every popular magazine at the time maintained. This paradigm made me think about the power of media to inform political and cultural messages despite this underbelly of grassroots truths.

Why does media have such a big impact on our ideas of beauty such that a generation went out to spend its money on Farrah Fawcett posters to the tune of making it the biggest-selling poster of all time? And how is it that media, to include new media today, can influence a generation to commodify the self?

Naomi Wolf’s best-selling book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women(1990), develops a theory of the “beauty myth” whereby Wolf contends: “Just as the beauty myth did not really care what women looked like as long as women felt ugly, we must see that it does not matter in the least what women look like as long as we feel beautiful.” Posing a challenge to second-wave feminism which claims that standards of beauty are patriarchal imperatives which oppress women, Wolf’s book contends that beauty is the “last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact,” maintaining that beauty is something women can hook into in order to empower themselves. The bigger problem, however, reverts back to mass media: Who decides what is beautiful and do women have any agency under either feminist model?

This is where communications theory enters stage left and theories emanating from over fifty years ago, still hold true: It’s the media, stupid! From Marshall McLuhan’s work on media whereby he concludes, “All advertising advertises advertising” to contemporary anthropology, we have veritable proof today that media creates and nurtures social constructs and even seeds the roots for personal anxieties. While countless businesses thrive as a result of these anxieties creating part of our beauty-obsessed culture and the beauty market, the jury is out as to whether a woman putting on face cream is selling out to “the patriarchy” as many feminists contend, or if she is simply moisturizing her skin.