The theoretical essay "Myth Today" would be academic without the fifty individual analyses in Mythologies that preceded it. The individual analyses are the heart of the book, they are where Barthes shows what the method actually does, and they are written with a pleasure and precision that is rare in cultural criticism. Three are worth detailed attention.
"The World of Wrestling" is the essay that opens the English edition, and it is one of the finest pieces of cultural analysis written in the 20th century. Barthes begins with a distinction that is precise and immediately illuminating: wrestling is not a sport in the sense that boxing is a sport. Boxing aims at a result, one boxer defeating another through genuine athletic superiority. Wrestling aims at something entirely different: the perfect legibility of passion. What wrestling stages is not a contest but a theater of justice, suffering, and retribution in which the moral drama is physically performed with maximum clarity.
The roles in wrestling are not Winner and Loser but Bastard, Coward, and Righteous Man. The Bastard is the heel who cheats, who exploits the referee's blind spot, who uses every dirty trick, who provokes the crowd's genuine moral indignation. The Righteous Man is the face who suffers genuinely, who endures unfair punishment with stoic dignity, and who eventually achieves vengeance. The whole event, Barthes argues, is a sign system in which bodies become the readable text of moral categories. The size of a wrestler's gut is not just physical, it conveys a moral quality (sloth, corruption). The precision of a submission hold is not just athletic, it communicates the logic of punitive justice. The suffering is not just performed, it makes moral truth physically present in a way that satisfies a deep cultural appetite for justice to be visible and embodied, not just abstract.
Note what Barthes is not doing: he is not sneering at wrestling audiences as stupid or gullible. He is treating their pleasure as philosophically serious data. Wrestling audiences are not confused about whether wrestling is real fighting. They are enjoying something that satisfies a genuine cultural need, for a world in which moral categories are perfectly clear and justice is enacted with satisfying physical force. The myth of wrestling is the myth that the social world has the intelligible moral structure of the wrestling ring.
"Wine and Milk" is Barthes's analysis of French wine as a cultural myth, one of his sharpest demonstrations of how a commodity acquires an ideological aura. Wine, he argues, is part of the fundamental mythology of French identity. It is, as he puts it, the totem drink of France, and the mythology is elaborated with breathtaking contradictions. Wine is the same substance, yet it is simultaneously: a substance that warms in winter and refreshes in summer. A drink that makes the weak strong and the talkative silent. A mark of sophistication and a sign of peasant authenticity. The communion of the working man and the connoisseur's art. These contradictions do not destabilize the myth, they are precisely the mark of a powerful totem, which must be able to accommodate everything.
As the primary texts note, Barthes shows that "society labels sick, infirm, or brutal anyone who does not believe in wine." Not to drink wine is not just a personal preference. It is a social statement of non-Frenchness, of abnormality, of refusal to participate in the national communion. And behind this entire mythological construction, beneath the talk of soil and sun and tradition and authenticity, is a commodity produced for profit, its image carefully cultivated by an industry that was at the time exploiting Algerian land and labor for the benefit of French settlers and distillers. The myth of wine as natural, ancestral, and freely communal serves to render this economic reality invisible.
"Toys" is brief and devastating. Barthes contrasts contemporary plastic toys (cars, spaceships, army sets, miniature domestic appliances) with traditional wooden toys, and the contrast is ideologically revealing. Plastic toys are miniature replicas of the adult world, fully formed and handed down to the child ready-made. The child who plays with them does not create or transform, they practice the world they will inhabit. They are being trained in the consumption and use of adult categories: here are the weapons, here is the kitchen, here is the car, here is the office. The toys are an initiation into a specific, class-determined adult world, and the child's role is to receive them and reproduce their logic in play.
Wooden toys, by contrast, involve a different relationship between the child and matter. Wood is a resistant, warm, genuinely transformable substance, it can become a block, a rail, a bridge. The child working with wooden toys is in a creative relationship with material that offers resistance and possibility. Barthes is not making a Luddite argument against modernity. He is observing that the specific form modern toys take encodes a specific pedagogical ideology: the child as consumer and reproducer of pre-formed adult categories rather than as a creative agent who transforms raw material into new forms.