Foucault's notion of the "micro-physics of power" is deployed by the readings.  The impression given is that a woman is literally incarcerated in her clothes/body--born into a body whose perceived shortcomings mean that she must artificially sculpt another body for herself, a second body that fits her like a straightjacket.

The truth in this, in an age in which corsets were worn, is easy to visualize; and, more recently, mini-skirts and high heels obviously hamper freedom of movement.  However, ease of action and access to brute force as a resource, are but one modality of power; just because, physically, women are socialized to hem in their movements--to move less forthrightly than men--doesn't mean that they lack power altogether, since power comes in multiple modalities.  As Brownmiller points out, royalty used to be immobilized under the weight of sartorial gear, and such immobilization was the sign not of weakness, but of freedom from physical labor, since all one's wishes were being carried out by servants.

Nowadays--now that women are no longer cooped up and can be sighted jogging in Central Park--one serious sin that the Beauty Myth continues to commit is that it limits opportunities for people who are physically or temperamentally or otherwise unsuited to play by its rules; such people may be discriminated against in multiple ways (passionally, economically).

Bartky, citing the Foucaultian discourse on surveillance, points out that a woman driven to conform to her society's template of 'ideal femininity' internalizes a witness who sits in judgment on her efforts to measure up.  Narcissism (for which the woman is typically blamed) is actually mediated through this third term, this introjected otherness that stands in for the 'gaze' of the patriarchal culture, a gaze whose view of 'beauty' has very definite, set parameters.

Bartky is understandably reluctant to formulate the pleasures that might come out of "objectification" in a looser sense--the pleasures of masochism, e.g., or merely the license to luxuriate in one's embodiment that the surrender to objecthood entails--other than as forms of false consciousness.  The readings, as a whole, take an overly totalistic view of the efficacy of the parameters of 'beauty' set out in any given fashion cycle or phase.  They are reluctant to recognize that a plurality of 'looks' may be found winning by given individuals in any given phase.  Real life, nowadays, is less rigorous than the paranoid Foucaultian notion of a "micro-physics of power" is prepared to concede.  Today, the Beauty Myth is never singular or monolithic in its view of beauty, even synchronically.