The Cult of Beauty: How Society Forces Women to Change Their Bodies

“With a figure like yours, it’s better not to wear that.” “Your waist is your weak point.” “For her age, she doesn’t look bad.” A woman is constantly being told that something is wrong with her body—that it needs to be tightened, kept under control, and remade. The way it’s considered proper to walk, sit, give birth, and even hold a spoon is shaped by time, place, and upbringing, but we stubbornly mistake our habits for “natural” things, and our tastes for personal choice.

Philosopher Anastasia Toropova explores how culture, ideology, and economics construct the idea of a “normal” body: from the ancient notion of woman as an “inadequate man,” and the corset as a mechanism of social division, to the figure of Kim Kardashian as the consumer era’s ideal.

In this engrossing audiobook, David Lynch and Aristotle stand side by side, as do Nadezhda Kadysheva and Charli XCX, Olga Buzova and Descartes, the Pinterest syndrome and “uterine breathing.” Through fashion, advertising, spiritual practices, dating, and social media, the author shows how everyday rituals assemble our embodiment—and why it’s so hard to understand where, in the sensations of your own body, the imposed ends and your own begins.