Our Shared Shelf discussion

Hey everyone!
I thought of a cool idea, do you remember when people would tell you "don't judge a book by its cover"?
Well I think it would be a cool idea to go ahead and do that and see what we are expecting and wanting to get from this book!

I will go ahead and start the first one myself.

Judging by the cover there's a picture of a woman figurine looking in the mirror, half dressed.
I think that this could be addressing the fact that most countries are okay with the saying "sex sells" -and it most certainly does.
I think this books could be addressing that point in culture and turning it on its face and revealing why that is, and explaining that it's not necessary and hopefully give us an understandable way to not just realise it, but change it.

That's just what I could judge by the books cover.
What do you think?
Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions on either my judgment of the book, or your own!

I agree, society today is fixated on physical perfection. The cover reminds me so much of the models on the magazines that I used to read growing up. The idea of society's perfect figure has brain-washed young girls and women into to thinking that if they do not look a certain way then they are outcasts of society. This makes the book all that more intriguing as to how it'll approach this topic.

What I think looking at the cover is that today's women are very self conscious and vain,so much so that before anyone else can tell them anything about there looks,they themselves tend to uphold a certain aura and stature for there looks.And to add to it,society has kept certain standards of how women should dress up,which has basically put them on this pedestal of beauty that they must live up to each time they walk out of their house.This pedestal of beauty has not only raised the standards of achieving unnecessary perfection in an exaggerated field,but has also led to a decline of how women can actually be themselves and be different.
So,if i were to write a book with that type of a cover,these are the issues that would be highlighted in it.

The Kindle version has a stylised hour class on the cover. Thought that was a witty play on the western cultural ideal figure for a woman. That kind of care is why the book was so ground breaking it combined image with the discussion of image the place of women in an image driven world controlled by men. The use of statistics and tabulated data to support gender argument was not common at the time either.

I actually think that this cover is pretty good:
https://www.amazon.com/Der-Mythos-Sch...

But I also really like the hour-glass cover, especially the hour-glass cover and the covers that Emma, Ross and Wolf have mentioned. They show just how much pressure there is on women in general.

I still have to fetch mine from the library, but I'll let you know which cover it has!

When I first saw the cover of the book, several things came to my mind. I immediately thought that the book was going to be about how much beauty can affect a woman's life. It can either help her out in many ways, or it could destroy her. Sadly, beauty seems to affect the amount of success a woman can achieve. But now I need to read the book to see what it is about!

Hi, I think this book will focus on the idea of what woman think they "should" look like, and society's "perfect" body image compared to natural beauty and feeling comfortable in your own skin. I guess we'll see. ~Grace

When i saw the cover and the title "The Beauty Myth" I thought the bool would be about how beauty, i.e. makeup and skincare is all a big marketing gimmick for compaines to profit off of womens insecurities. The marketing gimmick is basically we want to make everyone flawless even though its not possible. Now we are a society of imsecure women who have no idea how to be comfortable in their own skin. I know not everyone is this way but the vast majority are.

well, the cover I saw was a pocket mirror with a woman reflected in it and the first thing that got my atention was the emptyness replacing her eyes... I thought it was like when you dress up for something, a date or a job interview and you look in the mirror and question yourself why on top of everything else you have to worry about your look too!

i mean, if I go to an interview I take about 40 minutes to an hour to get ready. My brother takes about 25 minutes including showering and it is something that passed on my mind a few times...

now lets ready it and see if i got the right idea or not

The copy I just purchased has a rough edged drawing of an eye (just the outline and a circle) with scribbled looking circles behind it.

'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder' is a phase that popped into my mind, having that eye just under the title. The circles gave it a sense of manic tiredness and anxiety.

How interesting that as beauty is defined so differently in different cultures, this very book has such a variety of covers to illustrate that! Mine, too, is the figurine in what looks like a bra and a slip holding a mirror up to look at herself. She's on a little platform, which I think is very symbolic.