Femininity (2 page)

The competitive aspect of femininity, the female-against-female competition produced
by the effort to attract and secure men, is one of the major themes I have tried to
explore. Male-against-male competition for high rank and access to females is a popular
subject in anthropology, in the study of animals as well as humans, but few scholars
have thought to examine the pitched battle of females for ranking and access to males.
Yet the struggle to approach the feminine ideal, to match the femininity of other
women, and especially to outdo them, is the chief competitive arena (surely it is
the only sanctioned arena) in which the American woman is wholeheartedly encouraged
to contend. Whether or not this absorbing form of competition is a healthy or useful
survival strategy is a critical question.

Hymns to femininity, combined with instruction, have never been lacking. Several generations
of us are acquainted with sugar and spice, can recite the job description for “The
Girl That I Marry” (doll-size, soft and pink, wears lace and nail polish, gardenia
in the hair), or wail the payoff to “Just Like a Woman” (“She breaks like a little
girl”). My contribution may be decidedly unmusical, but it is not a manual of how-not-to,
nor a wholesale damnation. Femininity deserves some hard reckoning, and this is what
I have tried to do.

A powerful esthetic that is built upon a recognition of powerlessness is a slippery
subject to grapple with, for its contradictions are elusive, ephemeral and ultimately
impressive. A manner that combines a deferential attitude with ornaments of the upper
class and an etiquette composed in equal parts of modesty and exhibition are paradoxes
that require thoughtful interpretation. A strategy of survival that is based on overt
concession and imposed restrictions deserves close study, for what is lost and what
is gained is not always apparent. By organizing my chapters along pragmatic lines—body,
hair, clothes, voice, etcetera—I have attempted a rational analysis that is free of
mystification. Coming down hard on certain familiar aspects while admitting a fond
tolerance for some others has been unavoidable in my attempt to give an honest appraisal
of the feminine strategies as I have myself practiced or discarded them. I do not
mean to project my particular compromises and choices as the better way, or the final
word, nor do I mean to condemn those women who practice the craft in ways that are
different from mine. I offer this book as a step toward awareness, in the hope that
one day the feminine ideal will no longer be used to perpetuate inequality between
the sexes, and that exaggeration will not be required to rest secure in biological
gender.

SUSAN BROWNMILLER

New York City

September 1983

T
HE NUDE, SAID KENNETH CLARK
in his study of the ideal figure, was an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth
century B.C., “just as opera was an art form invented in seventeenth-century Italy.”
In the masculine urge to celebrate erotic perfection, the sculpted naked body was
a harmonious design that illustrated divinity and strength. Wrinkles and other imperfections
were never permitted. Geometric proportion was a mystical religion. The first great
nudes were beautiful young men. Somewhat later they were joined by beautiful young
women.

According to the classical Greeks, in the perfect female torso the distance between
the nipples of the breasts, the distance from the lower edge of the breast to the
navel, and the distance from the navel to the crotch were units of equal length. Centuries
later, the Gothic ideal was strikingly different. With the breasts reduced to oval
spheres that Clark finds “distressingly small,” and with the stomach expanded to a
long ovoid curve that suggests an advanced state of pregnancy, at least to the modern
eye, Clark finds that “the navel is exactly twice as far down the body as it is in
the classical scheme.” The Greek, the Gothic and the Renaissance ideals do share some
similarities. In all three forms the feet and toes are wide, strong and sturdy, and
the fingernails, when they show, are trimmed short and blunt by modern standards.

Ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph, whatever natural variations the human form can take,
the idealization of the feminine form in a given age is usually one form only, and
ideas of perfection can change with lightning speed. Not surprisingly, the
ideal feminine shape most often goes under the name of Venus, for Venus is the goddess
of love, and as the poet Byron expressed it for his sex, “Man’s love is of man’s life
a thing apart;/’Tis woman’s whole existence.” The first discovered example of a famous
paleolithic figurine, all breasts, belly and buttocks, which defied any accepted standard
of feminine beauty, was sarcastically named the
Venus of Willendorf,
as a joke among men.

The tyranny of Venus is felt whenever a woman thinks—or whenever a man thinks and
tells a woman—that her hips are too wide, her thighs are too large, her breasts are
too small, her waist is too high, her legs are too short to meet the current erotic
standard. In London society on the eve of World War I, a Venus painted by the seventeenth-century
Spaniard Velasquez was thought to be the most perfect Venus of them all (she still
has her champions today). Known as the
Rokeby Venus,
she reclines odalisque-style with her back to the viewer while she regards her face
in a mirror (oh, feminine vanity; oh, feminine wiles). The most memorable aspect of
the
Rokeby Venus,
indeed the focal point of the painterly composition, is—to put it straightforwardly—the
voluptuous expanse of her naked ass.

In 1914 when the militant suffrage campaign in England had reached the stage of guerrilla
warfare and Mrs. Pankhurst was on hunger strike in Holloway prison, a movement activist
named Mary Richardson, alias Polly Dick, decided on an audacious act. Making a stunning
connection between the public celebration of the erotic feminine nude and the refusal
of Britain’s male Parliament to grant women the vote, Mary Richardson walked into
the National Gallery with a small ax tucked into the sleeve of her jacket and broke
the glass that protected the
Rokeby Venus
before she was dragged off by the guards.

With a symmetry that may be as common in politics as it is in art, the new wave of
feminism that began fifteen years ago in the United States coincidentally chose to
attack a symbol of Venus in its first dramatic act. In 1968 the Women’s Liberation
Movement announced itself to a startled public by staging a demonstration at the Miss
America contest in Atlantic City, protesting, among other points, “Women in our society
are forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous beauty
standards that we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously and to accept.”

At what age does a girl child begin to review her assets and count her deficient parts?
When does she close the bedroom door and begin to gaze privately into the mirror at
contortionist angles to get a view from the rear, the left profile, the right, to
check the curve of her calf muscle, the shape of her thighs, to ponder her shoulder
blades and wonder if she is going to have a waistline? And pull in her stomach, throw
out her chest and pose again in a search for the most flattering angle, making a mental
note of what needs to be worked on, what had better develop, stay contained, or else?
At what age does the process begin, this obsessive concentration on the minutiae of
her physical being that will occupy some portion of her waking hours quite possibly
for the rest of her life? When is she allowed to forget that her anatomy is being
monitored by others, that there is a standard of desirable beauty, of individual parts,
that she is measured against by boyfriends, loved ones, acquaintances at work, competitors,
enemies and strangers? How can she be immune to the national celebration of this season’s
movie star sporting this season’s body, to the calendar art in the neighborhood gas
station, to the glamorous model in the high-fashion photograph, to the chance remark
of a lover, the wistful preference of a husband, the whistle or the unexpected hostile
comment heard on the street?

As I remember, a thin, fragile wrist easily circled by the fingers of my other hand
was the first demonstration of femininity I demanded of my growing body; the second
was a small and tightly belted waist. Staying shorter than the boys, or at least not
vying for the place in line of tallest girl, became the next consuming worry. “My,
she’s growing up,” and “Isn’t she getting big?” were warning rumbles. By the fifth
grade I knew that bigness was not what I was after. Slight and slender were my grownup
ambitions. Too often for comfort my mother, statuesque and on the heavy side, had
teased (in front of my father!) that I was going to inherit her ample bosom.
No I won’t,
I’d mutter, in awe of what I’d seen when we shared a bath. Even worse was the fear
that I might not develop at all, that I’d be stuck wearing undershirts for the rest
of my life.

She had communicated to me, without really meaning to, I think, that breasts were
a problem. Hers had been ruined, she believed, when she had bound them tightly to
achieve the flat, boyish, flapper look of the 1920s. “Don’t ever bind your breasts,”
my full-figured mother would say as she poured her flesh into a long-line brassiere-and-girdle
combination. As it turned out, this was advice I never needed. At college in the Fifties,
the Jane Russell/Marilyn Monroe inflated mammary era, I agonized that I was miserably
flatchested and wore my small breasts unnaturally high and pointed in a push-up bra
with foam-rubber padding.

At least I wasn’t broadshouldered and I didn’t have thick ankles. As for dimpled knees,
I found that concept puzzling, for mine were bone-hard and knobby, but even more unsettling
was their failure to touch when I stood up straight with my feet pressed together.
I had to admit I was hopelessly bowlegged. In truth, I didn’t form an opinion about
my rear end until the middle of the Sixties, for I had grown up in the era of the
panty girdle and the two-way stretch, when all young ladies were said to require some
abdominal support and containment of our shaking buttocks, not to mention a secure
means of holding up our stockings. By the mid-1960s when I put away my bra and girdle
in response to a newer model of the feminine body, I found that without one iota of
change in my physical dimensions, my breasts were suddenly not too small, and my thighs,
hips and buttocks had passed the supreme test—they could fit without chafing into
a pair of men’s jeans.

In recent years my stomach has been showing signs of spread, implacably female instead
of teenage flat, and I cannot pass a group of construction workers on a New York City
street without involuntarily sucking in my gut. I do my yoga every morning, eat less
than I used to and try not to think about chocolate. Staying thin has replaced staying
shorter than the boys and “We must, we must, we must increase our bust” as my bodily
desire, and I expect I will continue to be obsessed with weight until, like Lea in
The Last of Cheri,
I am past the age of sexual judgment and no longer concerned with what a man might
think.

At the moment of birth, gender difference in anatomy is a
fairly simple prospect.
It’s a girl … It’s a boy.
Those age-old cries of relief arise from one fast look at the baby’s genitalia. Patterned
by the chromosomal message—XX for a female, XY for a male—a tiny vulva or a little
penis is what we see. Beyond the genitals, sexual dimorphism in size and shape does
not occur until puberty, when according to a hormonal mechanism that is usually in
working order, the boys shoot up and the girls fill out to complete their maturation.

Triggered by her estrogens, the adolescent girl’s genitals increase in size and sensitivity,
her mammary ducts enlarge, her uterus expands and her pelvis widens. Her ovaries and
Fallopian tubes ready themselves for their reproductive function and menstruation
begins. Coming of age is marked externally by the appearance of fatty tissue that
cushions the pelvic area and mammary glands—the distinctly female soft flesh, the
ideally feminine rounded curves of the breasts, hips, buttocks and thighs. Reproductive
maturation gives a young woman her figure, the somatic emblem of her sexual essence.
Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated
parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for
judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse.

When the human male comes of age his genitals also enlarge and become reproductively
functional, and he is the proud recipient of increased muscle mass in his arms, chest,
back, shoulders and legs. This swift jump in musculature and strength may be enhanced
by exercise and sports, but the basic cause is genetic and hormonal. The estrogenic
property that adds soft fat to the female body has been used with great success by
poultry breeders who want to fatten and tenderize their products for the market, but
testosterone would make for a mighty tough chicken. At adolescence a male’s skeletal
frame grows larger than a female’s in all directions except for hip width, and his
bones become more dense. Broad shoulders, big bones and rippling muscles characterize
the ideal masculine form; they separate the men from the boys, and the man from the
woman.

A girl’s serious growing is usually over by age thirteen or so, shortly after first
menstruation, and she has reached her adult
height by the time she is eighteen. Just when she despairs that she will never find
a boy tall enough, the boys begin their big spurt. Males, who enter puberty two years
later than females, may continue to gain inches until they are twenty. When the sex
hormones act in concert with the growth hormones, testosterone is a powerful additive,
but a longer growing season for males because of their later maturation is the basic
reason why they end up 5 to 10 percent taller.