A dark satire of girlboss feminism and the cult of beauty
FICTION
Rytuał
Chloe Elisabeth Wilson
Penguin, $34.99
Despite our best efforts, the pursuit of beauty for women feels like an inescapable project of distraction. Case in point: we're not entirely sure if the overpriced lash serum will deliver on its promise of longer, lusher lashes, but we hand over money anyway because, well, we want to be beautiful.
We crave the power that beauty holds. We're comfortably deluded in contributing to the global industry that's worth $650 billion a year.
Being beautiful is a reliable religion. Or rather, wanting to be included in the exclusive club of Beautiful Women can feel like an ungovernable lust. In Chloe Elisabeth Wilson's debut novel, Rytuał, a dark, suspenseful yet funny book traces the obsessions and pitfalls of a group of young, listless Melburnian women vying for power under a beguiling boss.
Our heroine, Marnie, is a white woman in her late 20s. . She finds herself compromising her ethics and values to become a Beautiful Woman.
Her idol, Luna Peters, is the founder and CEO of Rytuał, a cosmetics brand with 10 simple products that generate more than $200 million in profit and has successfully cracked the international market.
When Marnie is randomly recruited to work for the company, she discovers a workplace run by aggressively aspirational women; women who own silk suits, have their curtain bangs trimmed every six weeks and make their own natural wine in their chic inner-city apartments and whose laughs (like their personalities) are rigidly 'neat and contained'.
The company is a McDonald's assortment of white 'girlboss' feminism circa 2008. The meeting rooms are named after women who have been 'unfairly treated in the public eye' – Billie [Holiday], Jean [Seberg], Amy [Winehouse], Britney [Spears].
'We come together to push out masculine norms and welcome in the divine feminine,' Luna espouses. 'We conspire together to overthrow destructive patriarchal standards.'
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