The Beauty Myth (13 page)

Its imagery and its method crudely imitate medieval Catholicism. The sway it claims over women’s lives is papal in its absoluteness. Its influence over modern women, like the medieval Church over all of Christendom, extends far past the individual soul to form the philosophy, politics, sexuality, and economy of the age. The Church shaped and gave meaning not only to devotional life, but to all the events of the community, brooking no division between the secular and the religious; the Rites pervade the days of modern women as thoroughly. Like the medieval Church, the Rites are believed to be based on a creed as palpable as the Rock of the Vatican: that there is such a thing as beauty, that it is holy, and that women should seek to attain it. Both institutions are wealthy, living off tithes; neither forgives
unrepentant deviants and heretics. Members of both churches learn their catechism from the cradle. Both need unquestioning faith from their followers in order to sustain themselves.

Above this root of faux-medieval Catholicism, the Rites of Beauty have accumulated several newer elements: a Lutheranism in which the fashion models are the Elect, and the rest of us are the Damned; an Episcopalian adaptation to the demands of consumerism, in that women can aspire to heaven through (lucrative) good works; an Orthodox Judaism of purity compulsions, in the minute and painstaking exegesis of hundreds of laws with their commentaries on what to eat, what to wear, what to do to the body and when; and a centerpiece from the Eleusinian mysteries in the death-and-rebirth ceremony. Over all this, the maximum-indoctrination techniques of modern cult movements have been faithfully adapted. Their blunt psychological manipulations help to win converts in an age not given to spontaneous professions of faith.

The Rites of Beauty are able to isolate women so well because it is not yet publicly recognized that devotees are trapped in something more serious than a fashion and more socially pervasive than a private distortion of self-image. The Rites are not yet described in terms of what they actually represent: a new fundamentalism transforming the secular West, repressive and doctrinaire as any Eastern counterpart. As women cope with a hypermodernity to which they have only recently been admitted, a force that is in effect a mass hypnosis into a medieval worldview is pushing on them its full weight. Meanwhile, the great cathedral under whose shadow they live goes unmentioned. When other women do refer to it—self-deprecatingly, under their breath—they do so only as if to describe a hallucination that all women can see, rather than a concrete reality that no one acknowledges.

The Rites seized women’s minds in the train of the women’s movement because oppression abhors a vacuum; they gave back to women what women had lost when God died in the West. In the past generation, changing sexual mores loosened religious constraints on female sexual behavior; the postwar decline in Church attendance and the breakdown of the traditional family relaxed the ability of religion to dictate a morality to women. In the dangerous momentary vacuum of religious authority, a risk
was implicit that women might bestow authority on the conciliatory, communitarian female tradition that Carol Gilligan researched in her
In a Different Voice
. That reclamation of moral authority could well lead women to make lasting social changes along its lines, and have the faith to call those changes God’s will. Compassion might replace hierarchy; a traditionally feminine respect for human life might severely damage an economy based on militarism and a job market based on the use of people as expendable resources. Women might recast human sexuality as proof of the sacredness of the body rather than of its sinfulness, and the old serviceable belief that equates femaleness with pollution might become obsolete. To preempt all that, the Rites of Beauty recently took over the job that traditional religious authority could no longer manage with conviction. By instilling in women an internal police force, the new religion often does better than the older ones at keeping women in order.

The new religion spread swiftly by taking advantage of women’s interim feeling of a loss of moral purpose, re-creating for them in physical terms the earlier social roles in which “good women” had been valued: chaste and self-denying mothers, daughters, and wives. Older tasks of defending propriety—“fitness”—and distinguishing between decent and indecent were ritually reconstructed. In the past quarter century, as society at large slipped off the constraints of traditional religious morality, the old moral code—diminished in scope, more constricted than ever, but functionally unchanged—tightened on women’s bodies.

For their part, many women welcomed this reassuring constriction on several levels. New religions spread with social chaos, and women are making up the rules in a world that has destroyed the old truths. This one gave them back the sense of social importance, female bonding, and the reassuring moral structure lost with the old religion. The competitive public realm rewards amorality, and women must adapt to succeed; but the Rites of Beauty give a working woman a way to carry a harmless, private moral order into a role in which too many old-fashioned scruples can sabotage her career. Women as secular careerists are often isolated, but as religious followers they share a comfortable bond.

Society at large no longer places religious importance on women’s virginity or marital chastity, asks them to confess their
sins or to keep a kitchen that is scrupulously kosher. In the interim after the “good” woman’s pedestal had been destroyed, but before she had acquired access to real power and authority, she was bereft of the older context in which she had been given the trappings of importance and praise. Devout women had indeed been called “good” (though they were “good” only so long as they were being devout). But in the secular age that paralleled the women’s movement, though women no longer heard every Sunday that they were damned, they very rarely heard anymore that they were “saintly.” Where Mary had been “blessed . . . among women,” and the Jewish Woman of Valor heard that “her price is beyond rubies,” all the modern woman can hope to hear is that she looks divine.

The Rites of Beauty also seduce women by meeting their current hunger for color and poetry. As they make their way into male public space that is often prosaic and emotionally dead, beauty’s sacraments glow brighter than ever. As women are inundated with claims on their time, ritual products give them an alibi to take some private time for themselves. At their best, they give women back a taste of mystery and sensuality to compensate them for their days spent in the harsh light of the workplace.

Women were primed to receive the Rites by their historical relationship to the Church. Since the Industrial Revolution, the “separate sphere” to which women were relegated specifically assigned piety to femininity. That in turn justified middle-class women’s separation from public life: Since women were designated as being “the pure sex,” they could be obliged to stay out of the common fray, preoccupied with maintaining that purity. In the same way, women today are designated as the “beautiful” sex, which relegates them to a similarly useful preoccupation with protecting that “beauty.”

The postindustrial feminization of religion did not, however, give women religious authority. “The Puritans . . . worshipped a patriarchal God, but . . . women outnumbered men in the New England Churches,” writes historian Nancy Cott in
The Bonds of Womanhood,
remarking that while the female majority grew throughout the nineteenth century, the Church hierarchy remained “strictly male.” The feminization of religion intensified side by side with the secularization of the male world. “Whatever
expansion the Protestant religious establishment experienced in post–Civil War America, it was an expansion fueled by women rather than by men,” Joan Jacobs Brumberg agrees. Women have not been admitted as ministers and rabbis until this generation. Until recently, their training has been to accept without question male clerical interpretations of what God wants women to do. Since the Industrial Revolution, their roles have involved not only religious obedience, but the humble support of Church activities, including, according to Ann Douglas in
The Feminization of American Culture
, sustaining personality cults devoted to the resident priest or minister. In short, women have a very brief tradition of participating in religious authority, and a very long one of submission to it; while seldom managing its profits, they have often given without question their widow’s mite.

Victorian female piety served the same double need as the Rites: From a male-dominated society’s point of view, it kept educated, leisured middle-class female energies harmlessly, even usefully, diverted from rebellion; and from those women’s point of view, it gave meaning to their economically unproductive lives. The British economist Harriet Martineau observed of American middle-class women that they “pursue[d] religion as an occupation” because they were constrained from exercising their full range of moral, intellectual and physical powers in other ways.” Nancy Cott writes that “the morphology of religious conversion echoed women’s expected self-resignation and submissiveness while it offered enormously satisfying assurance to converts.” The same seductive outlet is working the same way today.

The antiwoman bias of the Judeo-Christian tradition left fertile ground for the growth of the new religion. Its misogyny meant that women even more than men had to suspend critical thinking if they were to be believers. In rewarding women’s intellectual humility, charging them with sin and sexual guilt, and offering them redemption only through submission to a male mediator, it handed over to the developing religion a legacy of female credulousness.

What exactly is this newly demanding faith into which women are being indoctrinated?

The Judeo-Christian Creation story is the heart of the evolving religion. Because of the three verses, (Genesis 2:21–23), beginning “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs . . .,” it is women who are the population of believers the Rites of Beauty manipulate. Western women absorb from those verses the sense that their bodies are second-rate, an afterthought: Though God made Adam from clay, in his own image, Eve is an expendable rib. God breathed life directly into Adam’s nostrils, inspiring his body with divinity; but Eve’s body is twice removed from the Maker’s hand, imperfect matter born of matter.

Genesis explains why it is women who often need to offer their bodies to any male gaze that will legitimize them. “Beauty” now gives the female body the legitimacy that God withheld. Many women don’t believe that they are beautiful until they win the official seal of approval that men’s bodies possess in our culture simply because the Bible says they look like their Father. That seal must be bought or won from a male authority, a God the Father stand-in: surgeon, photographer, or judge. Women tend to worry about physical perfection in a way men seldom do because Genesis says that all men are created perfect, whereas Woman began as an inanimate piece of meat; malleable, unsculpted, unauthorized, raw—imperfect.

“Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect,” Jesus urged men. “The Past Forgiven. The Present Improved. The Future Perfect,” Elizabeth Arden promises women—as model Paulina Poriskova is perfect. Women’s craving for “perfection” is fired by the widespread belief that their bodies are inferior to men’s—second-rate matter that ages faster. “Men age better, of course,” asserts beautician Sally Wilson. “By second class,” writes Oscar Wilde in his
Lecture on Art,
“I mean that which constantly decreases in value.” 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.

Second-rate, woman-born, the female body is always in need of completion, of man-made ways to perfect it. The Rites of Beauty offer to fire the female body in the kiln of beauty to purge its dross, to give it its “finish.” The promise that Christianity makes about death, the Rites make about pain: that the believer will awaken on the other shore, in a body of light cleansed of mortal—female—stain. In the Christian heaven, one is purged of the body: “There is neither male nor female.” In the Rites, women purge themselves of the stain of their gender. The new ugliness of looking female merely stands in for the old ugliness of being female. Women are often angry at impulses of self-hatred that we feel to be archaic. But in seeing how the Rites are based on the Creation story, we can forgive ourselves: The burden of a tale that for thirty-five hundred years has taught women where they came from and what they’re made of is not going to be shrugged off lightly in two decades.

Men, on the other hand, since they made gods in their own image, feel that their bodies are essentially all right. Studies show that while women unrealistically distort their bodies negatively, men unrealistically distort theirs positively. The Western legacy of a religion based on the concept of men resembling God means that feeling at fault in their bodies is an article of faith for women that need not reflect reality. While only one man in ten is “strongly dissatisfied” with his body, one third of women are “strongly dissatisfied” with theirs. Though the sexes are overweight in equal proportions—about a third—95 percent of enrollees in weight-loss programs are women. Women think they have a serious problem when they are fifteen pounds above the national average; men are not concerned until they are thirty-five pounds above. Those numbers do not prove that women are an evil-looking gender, compared with the godlike race of men; if anything, more women than men resemble a cultural ideal, because they try harder. All they reflect is the Judeo-Christian tradition: Women’s flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods. The actual demographics of obesity
are irrelevant because this religion is not about whose body is fat, but whose body is wrong.