Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, published in New York in 1990 and an international bestseller, argued that as women gained political and professional equality in the late twentieth century, an increasingly demanding set of beauty standards — including undergarment fashions, cosmetics, and dieting regimes — was deployed as a new instrument of social control replacing the old legal and physical constraints. Wolf drew explicit parallels between nineteenth-century corsetry and twentieth-century bra advertising, cosmetic surgery culture, and weight obsession as successive technologies of female bodily discipline.

The Beauty Myth became a touchstone for feminist poets and essayists of the 1990s and 2000s who were addressing body image, appearance norms, and the new forms of constraint that had replaced the corset. Poets including Sharon Olds, writing from New York, and Carol Ann Duffy, writing from Britain, engaged with the female body under cultural inspection in terms that Wolf's analysis illuminated. The book helped establish body-politics poetry as a mainstream critical and creative genre.