*** Naomi Woolf – The Beauty Myth ***
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Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in
the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital
lies,” and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on
the social level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by
directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning
in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are
destructive communal illusions.
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Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a
powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically
guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of
slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery.
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There has never been such a potentially
destabilizing immigrant group asking for a fair chance to compete for access to
power.
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In women’s easy familiarity with the dominant
culture, in the bourgeois expectations of those who are middle class, in their
Third World work habits, and in their potential to fuse the anger and loyalties
of a galvanized underclass, the power structure correctly identifies a
Frankenstein composite of its worst minority terrors. Beauty discrimination has
become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough,
but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.
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When housework is accounted for, “women around
the world end up working twice as many hours as men.”
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Until the 1960s, the convention of referring to
unpaid work at home as “not real work” helped to confound women’s knowledge of
their hardworking labor tradition. Such a tactic was useless once women began
to do work that men recognize as male—that is, as labor worthy of its hire.
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The likelihood of backlash in some severe form
was underestimated because the American mind-set celebrates winning and avoids
noticing the corollary, that winners win only what losers lose.
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A real meritocracy means for men “more
competition at work and more housework at home.” What the aspirational message
ignores is the reaction of that half of the ruling elite who hold jobs that
belong by right of merit to women and who, if women were to move freely up the
ladder, would inevitably lose them. With what can the power structure defend
itself against this onslaught?
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What it needed was a replacement shackle, a new
material burden that would drain surplus energy and lower confidence, an
ideology that would produce the women workers it needs, but only in the mold in
which it wants them.
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In a court of law, to talk about something
imaginary as if it is real makes it real.
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Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it
looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it. A woman employer may
find a well-cut European herringbone twill, wantonly draped over a tautly
muscled masculine flank, madly provocative, especially since it suggests male
power and status, which our culture eroticizes. But the law is unlikely to see
good Savile Row tailoring her way if she tells its possessor he must service
her sexually or lose his job.
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It is the powerful who dictate the terms;
adults, play-wrestling a child, enjoy letting the child feel it has won.
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When a brilliant critic and a beautiful woman
(that’s my order of priorities, not necessarily those of the men who teach her)
puts on black suede spike heels and a ruby mouth before asking an influential
professor to be her thesis advisor, is she a slut? Or is she doing her duty to
herself, in a clear-eyed appraisal of a hostile or indifferent milieu, by
taking care to nourish her real gift under the protection of her incidental
one?
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The professional beauty qualification works
smoothly to put back into employment relations the grounds for exploitation
that recent equal opportunity laws have threatened. It gives employers what
they need economically in a female work force by affecting women
psychologically on several levels. The PBQ reinforces the double standard .
Women have always been paid less than men for equal work, and the PBQ gives
that double standard a new rationale where the old rationale is illegal.
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This proves again that the myth is political and
not sexual: Money does the work of history more efficiently than sex. Low
female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a
financial value to all of society. Women’s poor physical self-image today is
far less a result of sexual competition than of the needs of the marketplace.
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Women do earn more from selling their bodies
than their skills. “In this context,” writes legal scholar Catharine A.
MacKinnon, “it is instructive to ask: What is woman’s best economic option?”
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How can a woman believe in merit in a reality
like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her
body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for
women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay.
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When a woman says, “This will never be fair even
if I play by their rules,” she gains insight into the real workings of the
myth. No amount of labor will ever be adequately compensated; she will never,
hard though she may try, really “make it”; her birth is not the birth of a
beauty aristocrat, that mythic species. It isn’t fair. That’s why it exists.
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“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being
looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the
relation of women to themselves.”
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Advertisers are the West’s courteous censors.
They blur the line between editorial freedom and the demands of the
marketplace.
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The advertisers who make women’s mass culture
possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to
spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they
felt innately beautiful.
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In this century, most fields of thought have
been transformed by the understanding that truths are relative and perceptions
subjective.
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A man’s right to confer judgment on any woman’s
beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is
thought of as God-given. That right has become so urgently important for male
culture to exercise because it is the last unexamined right remaining intact
from the old list of masculine privilege: those that it was universally
believed that God or nature or another absolute authority bestowed upon all men
to exert over all women. As such, it is daily exercised more harshly in
compensation for the other rights over women, and the other ways to control
them, now lost forever.
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Of course, men don’t age any better physically.
They age better only in terms of social status. We misperceive in this way
since our eyes are trained to see time as a flaw on women’s faces where it is a
mark of character on men’s. If men’s main function were decorative and male
adolescence were seen as the peak of male value, a “distinguished” middle-aged
man would look shockingly flawed.
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A worshiper who does not feel guilty cannot be
counted on to support the Church; a woman who does not feel damaged cannot be
relied on to spend money for her “repair.”
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Society really doesn’t care about women’s
appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let
others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other
words, not to make sure that they will “be good,” but to make sure that they
will know they are being watched.
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“There is no application, no topical
application, that will get rid of grief or stress or heavy lines…. There’s
nothing, but nothing, that’s going to make you look younger. Nothing.” Anthea
Disney, editor of the women’s magazine Self, adds, “We all know there isn’t
anything that will make you look younger.” And as “Sam” Sugiyama, codirector of
Shiseido, concludes, “If you want to avoid aging, you must live in space. There
is no other way to avoid getting wrinkles, once you are out of the womb.”
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The success of a belief system depends upon how
well the religious leaders understand the emotional situation of its targets.
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Religious guilt suppresses women’s sexuality.
Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey found, in the words of political analyst Debbie
Taylor, that “religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man’s sexual
pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as the circumcision knife into a
woman’s enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might
otherwise experience.”
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Technically, the female sexual organs are what
the older religions feared as “the insatiable cunt.” Capable of multiple
orgasm, continual orgasm, a sharp and breathtaking clitoral orgasm, an orgasm
seemingly centered in the vagina that is emotionally overwhelming, orgasm from
having the breasts stroked, and of endless variations of all those responses
combined, women’s capacity for genital pleasure is theoretically inexhaustible.
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The sexual urge is shaped by society. Even
animals have to learn how to be sexual. It is learning rather than instinct,
anthropologists now believe, which leads to successful reproductive behavior:
Lab-raised monkeys are inept at sex, and human beings must also learn from
external cues how to be sexual.
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Sexual “explicitness” is not the issue. We could
use a lot more of that, if explicit meant honest and revealing; if there were a
full spectrum of erotic images of uncoerced real women and real men in contexts
of sexual trust, beauty pornography could theoretically hurt no one.
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Because we see many versions of the naked Iron
Maiden, we are asked to believe that our culture promotes the display of female
sexuality. It actually shows almost none. It censors representations of women’s
bodies, so that only the official versions are visible. Rather than seeing
images of female desire or that cater to female desire, we see mock-ups of
living mannequins, made to contort and grimace, immobilized and uncomfortable
under hot lights, professional set-pieces that reveal little about female
sexuality. In the United States and Great Britain, which have no tradition of
public nakedness, women rarely—and almost never outside a competitive
context—see what other women look like naked; we see only identical humanoid
products based loosely on women’s bodies.
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Rape fantasies projected into the culture are
benign, we’re told, even beneficial, when commentators dismiss them through
what Catharine MacKinnon has satirized as “the hydraulic model” of male
sexuality (it lets off steam). Men, we are given to understand, are harmlessly
interested in such fantasies; women are harmlessly interested in them (though
many women may have rape fantasies for no more subtle psychological reason than
that that image of sexuality is the primary one they witness).
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The practice of displaying breasts, for example,
in contexts in which the display of penises would be unthinkable, is portrayed
as trivial because breasts are not “as naked” as penises or vaginas; and the
idea of half exposing men in a similar way is moot because men don’t have body
parts comparable to breasts. But if we think about how women’s genitals are
physically concealed, unlike men’s, and how women’s breasts are physically
exposed, unlike men’s, it can be seen differently: women’s breasts, then
correspond to men’s penises as the vulnerable “sexual flower” on the body, so
that to display the former and conceal the latter makes women’s bodies
vulnerable while men’s are protected.
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To live in a culture in which women are
routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day
long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is
clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence
social—confidence while undermining that of women.
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Ads do not sell sex—that would be
counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one
another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
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Though the survival of the planet depends on
women’s values balancing men’s, consumer culture depends on maintaining a
broken line of communication between the sexes and promoting matching sexual
insecurities. Harley-Davidsons and Cuisinarts stand in for maleness and
femaleness. But sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism,
since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust
weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for
artificially buoying up this market is our heart’s desire. The beauty myth
keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no
law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking
distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom
to be sexually ourselves.
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Consumer culture is best supported by markets
made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be
objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the
market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in
obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one
woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women’s dissatisfaction
with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time.
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The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed
centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit,
unable to focus on the beauty of the woman—known, marked, lined, familiar—who
hands him the paper every morning.
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When they discuss this subject, women lean
forward, their voices lower. They tell their terrible secret. It’s my breasts,
they say. My hips. It’s my thighs. I hate my stomach. This is not aesthetic
distaste, but deep sexual shame. The parts of the body vary. But what each
woman who describes it shares is the conviction that that is what the
pornography of beauty most fetishizes. Breasts, thighs, buttocks, bellies; the
most sexually central parts of women, whose “ugliness” therefore becomes an
obsession.
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“Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly
misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the
two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual.
That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both “beautiful” and
“sexual” constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection
between the two is a recent invention. When society needed chastity from women,
virginity and fidelity endowed women with beauty
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Only recently, now that society is best served
by a population of women who are sexually available and sexually insecure,
“beauty” has been redefined as sex. Why? Because, unlike female sexuality,
innate to all women, “beauty” is hard work, few women are born with it, and it
is not free.
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The link between beauty pornography and sex is
not natural. It is taken for granted that the desire to have visual access to
an endless number of changing centerfolds is innately male, since that form of
looking is taken to be a sublimation of men’s innate promiscuity. But since men
are not naturally promiscuous and women are not naturally monogamous, it follows
that the truism so often asserted about beauty pornography—that men need it
because they are visually aroused while women aren’t—is not biologically
inevitable. Men are visually aroused by women’s bodies and less sensitive to
their arousal by women’s personalities because they are trained early into that
response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused
because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains
men’s power in the myth: They look at women’s bodies, evaluate, move on; their
own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over.
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The asymmetry of the beauty myth tells men and
women lies about each other’s bodies, to keep them sexually estranged. The
myth’s series of physical lies negates what a heterosexual woman knows to be
true about the bodies of men. Women are supposed to be the “soft-skinned” sex,
but a woman knows that the aureole around a man’s nipple is supremely soft, and
that there are places on his body where the outer skin is softer than anywhere
on a woman’s: the glans, the delicate covering of the shaft. Women are the
“sensitive” sex; yet there is no part of a woman’s body so vulnerable as the
testes. Women must keep their shirts on in every weather ostensibly because
their nipples are sexual. But men’s nipples are sexual too, and that doesn’t
keep them covered when the mercury breaks eighty. Women are “ugly” where they
get stretch marks. Men get stretch marks, across their hips, of which they are
often not aware. Women’s breasts must be perfectly symmetrical; men’s genitals
sure aren’t.
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When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what
they feared most from men, they replied, “We’re afraid they’ll kill us.” When
she asked men the same question about women, they replied, “We’re afraid
they’ll laugh at us.” When men control women’s sexuality, they are safe from
sexual evaluation.
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With women experimenting sexually, men risked
hearing what women hear every day: that there are sexual standards against
which they might be compared.
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Critical sexual comparison is a direct an-aphrodisiac
when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the
same effect on women, or we do not care, or we understand on some level that
right now that effect is desirable and appropriate.
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