In the fight for women's equality, one issue is still undiscussed, according to this book. The issue is women's compulsive pursuit of personal beauty. The book aims to confront this last taboo and expose it for what it really is - divisive, anti-erotic, hostile to love, not about women at all but about men. The author also confronts the beauty industry and its advertising, and uncovers the true reasons why thousands of women starve and stuff themselves, even submitting their bodies to the increasingly horrifying dangers of cosmetic surgery - all in the name of beauty. She examines the tyranny of the beauty myth throughout the ages, revealing how it is that women are coerced or seduced into conspiring with the myth to become their own jailers and torturers, and she shows how women can free themselves.