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A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot
of women as they judge men’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique,
penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes—all of which we do. The fact
is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as subjects for
sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male
“ideal” from a lineup; and if we could have male beauty as well as everything
else, most of us would not say no.
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Women could probably be trained quite easily to
see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if
a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available,
well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late
teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of
roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, “need”
beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises
were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left
nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and
ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and
circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with
no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the
only reason for them to exist—then a real young man would probably approach the
young woman’s bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.
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Imagery that is focused exclusively on the
female body was encouraged in an environment in which men could no longer
control sex but had for the first time to win it. Women who were preoccupied
with their own desirability were less likely to express and seek out what they
themselves desired.
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Women are vulnerable to absorbing the beauty
myth’s intervention in our sexuality because our sexual education is set up to
ensure that vulnerability. Female sexuality is turned inside out from birth, so
“beauty” can take its place, keeping women’s eyes lowered to their own bodies,
glancing up only to check their reflections in the eyes of men.
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We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men’s
sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see
that men’s desire precedes contact with women. It does not lie dormant waiting
to spring into being only in response to a woman’s will.
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Women come to confuse sexual looking with being
looked at sexually; many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt;
many confuse desiring with being desirable.
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Women say that when they lose weight they “feel
sexier”; but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don’t multiply with
weight loss.
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Could it be then that women’s famous slowness of
arousal relative to men’s, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many
experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual
imagery that affirms the female point of view, the cultural prohibition against
seeing men’s bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it relate to the taboo
against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman
actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her
satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for
his?
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One trouble with soft-core sexual imagery aimed
at young men is that the women photographed are not actually responding
sexually to anything; young men grow up trained to eroticize images that teach
them nothing about female desire. Nor are young women taught to eroticize
female desire. Both men and women, then, tend to eroticize only the woman’s
body and the man’s desire. That means that women are exaggeratedly sensitive to
male desire for their own arousal, and men are exaggeratedly insensitive to
female desire for theirs.
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Today’s children and young men and women have
sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy
to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features
obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that
is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.
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Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees
her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and
becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see, she
falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable. He may know her as
confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of
self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut,
weeping from a vexation she is ashamed even to express. He knows her as
prudent; she goes without winter boots because she spent half a week’s paycheck
on artfully packaged mineral oil. He knows her as sharing his love of the
country; she refuses to go with him to the seaside until her springtime fast is
ended. She’s convivial; but she rudely refuses a slice of birthday cake, only
to devour the ruins of anything at all in a frigid light at dawn.
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Nothing he can say about this is right. He can’t
speak. Whatever he says hurts her more. If he comforts her by calling the issue
trivial, he doesn’t understand. It isn’t trivial at all. If he agrees with her
that it’s serious, even worse: He can’t possibly love her, he thinks she’s fat
and ugly. If he says he loves her just as she is, worse still: He doesn’t think
she’s beautiful. If he lets her know that he loves her because she’s beautiful,
worst of all, though she can’t talk about this to anyone. That is supposed to
be what she wants most in the world, but it makes her feel bereft, unloved, and
alone.
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So the beauty myth sets it up this way: A high
rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her
lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to
worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by
scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend
women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate
the sentence “You’re beautiful,” which is next to “I love you” in expressing a
bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he
loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her,
she is destined to be unhappy. And the “luckiest” woman of all, told she is
loved because she’s “beautiful,” is often tormented because she lacks the
security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is.
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It is not insecurity speaking the woman’s lines
but—if she does have self-respect—hostility: Why should her lover, just because
he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she
need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his
reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he
says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a
number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man’s
intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of
carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial
that its snagged thread unravels the rest.
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“Only God, my dear,” wrote Yeats blithely,
“Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.”
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Beauty practices are being stressed so that the
relationships between men and women will continue, in spite of a social
movement toward equality, to feel dictatorial. Placing female pleasure, sex or
food or selfesteem, into the hands of a personal judge turns the man into a
legislator of the woman’s pleasure, rather than her companion in it. “Beauty”
today is what the female orgasm used to be: something given to women by men, if
they submitted to their feminine role and were lucky.
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Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by
teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing
women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and
gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a
numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.
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Simone de Beauvoir said that no man is truly
free to love a fat woman. If that is true, how free are men?
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There is physical attraction, and then there is
the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea
of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved
him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body
appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The
actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with
heat through the desirable person who animates it.
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By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a
work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot. The way in
which women regard men’s bodies sexually is proof that one can look at a person
sexually without reducing him or her to pieces.
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What becomes of the man who acquires a beautiful
woman, with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained
no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been
chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities.
He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition
impressive.
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Some men do get a sexual charge from a woman’s
objective “beauty,” just as some women feel sexual pleasure at the thought of a
man’s money or power. But it is often a status high, a form of exhibitionism,
that draws its power from the man imagining his buddies imagining him doing
what he is doing while he does it.
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Some men feel a sexual thrill upon smelling the
leather interior of a new Mercedes-Benz. It is not that that thrill is not
real, but that it is based on the meaning assigned by other men to that
leather. It is no deep psychosexual attachment to leather itself. There is
certainly a reflexive—not instinctive—male response to the cold economy of the
beauty myth; but that can be completely separated from sexual attraction, the
warm dialogue of desire.
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When men are more aroused by symbols of
sexuality than by the sexuality of women themselves, they are fetishists.
Fetishism treats a part as if it were the whole; men who choose a lover on the
basis of her “beauty” alone are treating the woman as a fetish—that is,
treating a part of her, her visual image, not even her skin, as if it were her
sexual self.
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The woman’s value as a fetish lies in the way
her “beauty” gives him status in the eyes of other men. So when a man has sex
with a woman whom he has chosen for her impersonal beauty alone, there are many
people in the room with him, but she is not among them. These relationships
disappoint both because both must live in public to get that constant,
recharging affirmation of the woman’s high exchange value. But sexual
relationships always go back to private space, where the beauty, as tediously
human as any other woman, makes the stubborn mistake of asking to be known.
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Attraction is a dialogue or dance or high-wire
balancing act that depends on the unique qualities, memories, patterns of
desire, of the two people involved; “beauty” is generic. Attraction is about a
sexual fit: two people imagining how they will work together. “Beauty” is only
visual, more real on film or in stone than in three living dimensions.
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One needs distance, even in the bedroom, to get
a really good look; other senses are more intoxicating close up. “Beauty”
leaves out smell, physical response, sounds, rhythm, chemistry, texture, fit,
in favor of a portrait on a pillow.
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The world of attraction grows blander and colder
as everyone, first women and soon men, begin to look alike. People lose one
another as more masks are assumed.
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A woman who is self-conscious can’t relax to let
her sensuality come into play.
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The Big Lie is the notion that if a lie is big
enough, people will believe it. The idea that adult women, with their fully
developed array of sexual characteristics, are inadequate to stimulate and
gratify heterosexual male desire, and that “beauty” is what will complete them,
is the beauty myth’s Big Lie.
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But female fat is the subject of public passion,
and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that
under the myth, women’s bodies are not our own but society’s, and that thinness
is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the
community. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about
female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.
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Individual men don’t “spin out fashionable
images” (indeed, research keeps proving that they are warm to women’s real
shapes and unmoved by the Iron Maiden); multinational corporations do that.
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At least a third of a woman’s life is marked
with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being
transformed into operable conditions—so that women will only feel healthy if we
are two thirds of the women we could be.
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The same tacit censorship that edits images of
women’s faces and body shapes also edits images of the female breast, keeping
women ignorant about what breasts are actually like. Culture screens breasts
with impeccable thoroughness, almost never representing those that are soft, or
asymmetrical, or mature, or that have gone through the changes of pregnancy.
Looking at breasts in culture, one would have little idea that real breasts
come in as many shapes and variations as there are women. Since most women
rarely if ever see or touch other women’s breasts, they have no idea what they
feel like, or of the way they move and shift with the body, or of how they
really look during lovemaking. Women of all ages have a fixation—sad in the
light of how varied women’s breasts really are in texture—on “pertness” and
“firmness.” Many young women suffer agonies of shame from their conviction that
they alone have stretch marks. Since beauty censorship keeps women in profound
darkness about other women’s real bodies, it is able to make virtually any
woman feel that her breasts alone are too soft or low or sagging or small or
big or weird or wrong, and to steal from her the full and exquisite eroticism
of the nipple.
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The beauty myth countered women’s new freedoms
by transposing the social limits to women’s lives directly onto our faces and
bodies. In response, we must now ask the questions about our place in our
bodies that women a generation ago asked about their place in society.
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We waste time in every generation debating the
symptoms more passionately than the disease.
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The problem with cosmetics exists only when
women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out
exists only if women hate ourselves when we don’t. When a woman is forced to
adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming in order to protect
her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must
attract a lover so that she can take care of her children, that is exactly what
makes “beauty” hurt. Because what hurts women about the beauty myth is not
adornment, or expressed sexuality, or time spent grooming, or the desire to
attract a lover. Many mammals groom, and every culture uses adornment.
“Natural” and “unnatural” are not the terms in question. The actual struggle is
between pain and pleasure, freedom and compulsion.
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Advertisers have recently figured out that
undermining sexual self-confidence works whatever the targeted gender.
According to The Guardian, “Men are now looking at mirrors instead of at
girls…. Beautiful men can now be seen selling everything.”
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