Once published, The Beauty Myth By Naomi Wolf quickly became a bestseller and elicited mixed reactions from the readership and the media. From a feminist angle, Wolf mainly received acclaim for her book and hypothesis. The book has been praised by the likes of Germaine Greer , Fay Weldon and Betty Friedan . The American newspaper The New York Times called it one of the most important works of the twentieth century.
Several thinkersbelieve that Wolf is grossly exaggerating the numbers on anorexia . Social critic Camille Paglia called Wolf's historical research and analysis 'flawed'.
In Opzij , Anja Meulenbelt wrote that Wolf's argument was by no means new, but that it was simply packaged differently, or in a more fashionable way. A journalist who reported about this in the NRC in 1994 pointed out that Meulenbelt accuses the attractive Wolf of personally benefiting from the Image Myth.
In Who Stole Feminism? (1994) Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the claim that 150,000 women are dying each year from anorexia in the United States, arguing that the true figure is probably between 100 and 400 per year. 4
Similarly, a 2004 article compared Wolf's eating disorder statistics with statistics from peer-reviewed epidemiological studies and concluded that "on average, an anorexia statistic in any edition of The Myth of Beauty would have to be divided by eight to get closer to the real statistic. ' Schoemaker estimated that there are approximately 525 deaths annually from anorexia, 286 times less than in statistics Wolf.
