Criticism
Christina Hoff Sommers criticized Wolf for publishing the claim that 150,000 women were dying every year from anorexia. Sommers claimed that the actual number is closer to 100, a figure which others, such as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, claimed to be much too low. In the same interview, Sommers stated that Wolf had retracted the figure. Jeanine Cogan, PhD, claims that the death totals may be underreported because death certificates don’t cite eating disorders per se as a cause of death.
Humanities scholar Camille Paglia also criticized the book, arguing that Wolf's historical research and analysis was deeply flawed.
A scathing 2004 paper compared Wolf's eating disorder statistics to statistics from peer-reviewed epidemiological studies and concluded that 'on average, an anorexia statistic in any edition of the The Beauty Myth should be divided by eight to get near the real statistic.' Schoemaker calculated that there are about 525 annual deaths from AN, 286 times less than Wolf's statistic.
Read more about this topic: The Beauty Myth
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