The Beauty Myth (15 page)

At the end comes victory and new life: The death in the desert of the old, tainted generation is redeemed with the birth of a new one, who may enter the Promised Land. The baptized person assumes another name, a new status in the community. The newly made up or coiffed or thin woman, the woman with the surgically “new face,” celebrates her fresh identity and returns to take up what she hopes will be an improved status. She is told, to prepare for reentry, to buy clothes, get a haircut, take on the accessories of an altered personality. Presented as incentive for weight loss, or camouflage for surgery, that advice is elementary magic.

The new religion improves on the others, because redemption does not last. The “supportive” rhetoric of the diet industry masks the obvious: The last thing it wants is for women to get thin once and for all. Ninety-eight percent of dieters regain the weight. “The diet industry is an entrepreneur’s delight,” writes Brumberg, “because the market is self-generating and intrinsically expansive. Predicated on failure . . . the interest in diet strategies, techniques and products seems unlimited.” The same holds for the antiage industry, which a truly effective product (or universal female self-esteem) would destroy. Fortunately for the industry, even surgery patients continue to age at the rate of 100 percent. The “new me” is washed off with the evening’s bath. The cycle must begin again from the start, since living in time and having to eat to live are both sins against the God of Beauty—and both, of course, inevitable.

When women adapt too well to the strictures of the industries, the weight or age that defines grace merely adjusts by plummeting: The models descend another ten pounds, the surgeons lower the “preventive” age for a first face-lift by another decade. From the industries’ point of view, the one scenario worse than women winning at this rigged game would be for them to lose interest in playing it at all. The repeating loop of the purification cycle prevents that. A woman is scarcely given the chance to think before she must take up her burden again, the journey growing more arduous each time.

The Rites of Beauty are intended to make women archaically morbid. Five hundred years ago, men thought about their lives in relation to death as women today are asked to imagine the life span of beauty: Surrounded by sudden inexplicable deaths, medieval Christianity made the worshiper’s constant awareness of mortality a lifetime obsession. The dangers of childbirth intensified the consciousness of death for women, as was exemplified by the use of Psalm 116 by women in labor: “The snares of death compassed me round, and the pains of hell gat hold on me . . . O Lord I beseech thee, deliver my soul.” This once-general
morbidity became primarily feminine in the nineteenth century. Scientific advances tempered men’s sense of fatality, but well into the industrial age, the specter of death in the childbed forced women often to dwell upon the condition of their souls. After antisepsis lowered the maternal death rate and once women became valued as beauties rather than mothers, this preoccupation with loss was channeled into fears about the death of “beauty.” So many women still feel they are surrounded by ill-understood forces that can strike at any time, destroying what has been represented to them as life itself. When a woman with her back to the TV camera describes a botched surgical job, saying, “He took away my beauty. In one blow. It’s all gone,” she is expressing a sense of helpless resignation that harks back to the way preindustrial societies responded to natural disaster.

To understand the primal force of this religion, we need to see that men die once and woman die twice. Women die as beauties before their bodies die.

Women today in the full bloom of beauty keep a space always in mind for its diminution and loss. Medieval death awareness that “all flesh is grass,” the
memento mori,
kept men economically aligned to the Church, which could give them “new life” beyond their natural life-span. For women to be urged to think continually of beauty’s fragility and transcience is a way to try to keep us subservient, by maintaining in us a fatalism that has not been part of Western men’s thinking since the Renaissance. Taught that God or nature does or does not bestow “beauty” on them—randomly, beyond appeal—we live in a world in which magic, prayer, and superstition make sense.

Eve’s sin meant that women are responsible for losing grace. “Grace” was redefined during the Renaissance as a secular term, and used to describe the faces and bodies of “beautiful” women.

Skin cream—the “holy oil” of the new religion—promises “radiance” in its advertising. Many religions use a light metaphor for divinity: Moses’ face when he descended from Mount Sinai blazed like the sun, and medieval iconography surrounded saints
with halos. The holy oil industry offers to sell back to women in tubes and bottles the light of grace, to redeem women’s bodies now that the cults of virginity and of motherhood can no longer offer to surround with consecrated light the female body whose sexuality has been yielded to others.

Light is in fact the issue, central to an innate way of seeing beauty that is shared by many, if not most, women and men. This way of seeing is what the beauty myth works hard to suppress. In describing this quality of light or having it described, one becomes uneasy, quick to dismiss it as sentimentality or mysticism. The source of the denial, I think, is not that we do not see this phenomenon, but rather that we see it so very clearly; and that publicly to name it threatens some basic premises of our social organization. It is proof as nothing else is that people are not things: People “light up” and objects don’t. To agree that it is real would challenge a social system that works by designating some people as more thinglike than others, and all women as more thinglike than all men.

This light doesn’t photograph well, can’t be measured on a scale of one to ten, won’t be quantified in a lab report. But most people are aware that a radiance can emerge from faces and bodies, making them truly beautiful.

Some see that radiance as inseparable from love and intimacy, not picked up by a separate visual sense but as part of the movement or warmth of a familiar. Others might see it in a body’s sexuality; still others, in vulnerability, or wit. It strikes one often from the face of someone telling a story or listening intently to someone else. Many have remarked on how the act of creation seems to illuminate people, and have noticed how it envelops most children—those who have not been told yet that they are not beautiful. We very often remember our mothers as beautiful simply because it lit them up in our eyes. If any general descriptions can be drawn, a sense of wholeness seems involved, and maybe trust. To see this light, it seems, one has to look for it. The poet May Sarton calls it “the pure light that shines from the lover.” Probably everyone has a different name for it and perceives it differently; but most know that it exists for them. The point is that you have seen it—your version—and have probably
been dazzled or excited or attracted; and that, according to the myth, it does not count.

Society severely limits descriptions of this light, so as to keep it from taking on the force of a social reality. Women are said to emit it, for instance, only in the act of giving their bodies to men or to children: the “radiant bride” and the “radiant mother-to-be.” Straight men are almost never told that they are luminous, radiant, or dazzling. The Rites of Beauty offer to sell women back an imitation of the light that is ours already, the central grace we are forbidden to say that we see.

To do so, they ask women to negotiate a three-dimensional world by two-dimensional rules. Women “know” that fashion photographs are professionally lit to imitate this radiant quality. But since we as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women, we are urged to study ways to light up our features as if they were photographs marred by motion, acting as our own lighting designer and stylist and photographer, our faces handled like museum pieces, expertly lit with highlights, lowlights, Light Effects, Frost n’ Glow, Light Powder, Iridescence, and Iridience.

Synthetic light comes with rules. Older women must not use frost effects. What light will the woman be seen in—office, daylight, candlelight? Women’s mirrors have lights built in; if we’re caught in an unexpected setting, we will be exposed, like a photograph that, in the wrong light, turns to nothing. That stress on special effects serves to addict women psychologically to civilized indoor lighting, traditional female space; to keep us fearful of spontaneity and digression. Beauty’s self-consciousness is intended to hover at skin level in order to keep women from moving far inside to an erotic center or far afield into the big space of the public realm. It is intended to make sure we do not catch a glimpse of ourselves in a brand-new light altogether.

Other practices drive women indoors as well. Once she uses Retin-A, a woman must abandon the sun
forever
. Cosmetic surgery demands that women hide indoors away from the sun for times ranging from six weeks to six months. The discovery of “photoaging” has created a phobia of the sun entirely unrelated to
the risk of skin cancer. While it is true that the ozone layer is thinning, this sun-phobia mentality is severing the bond between women and the natural world, turning nature into the fearsome enemy of the male tradition’s point of view. If the female tradition were not under siege, the damaged ozone layer should be sending women out onto the environmental barricades to protect it. The beauty myth stimulates women’s fears of looking older in order to drive us in the opposite direction: indoors once more, locus of the separate sphere and the Feminine Mystique; the proper place for women in every culture that most oppresses us.

Indoors or out, women must make their beauty glitter because they are
so hard for men to see
. They glitter as a bid for attention that is otherwise grudgingly given. Catching light draws the eye in a basic unsubtle reflex: Babies’ undeveloped eyes follow glittering objects. It is the one way in which women are allowed to shout in order to command attention. Men who glitter, on the other hand, are either low-status or not real men: gold teeth, flashy jewelry; ice skaters, Liberace. Real men are matte. Their surfaces must not distract attention from what it is they are saying. But women of every status glint. Dale Spender, in
Man Made Language,
shows that when in conversation, men cut off women in most of the interruptions by far and that men give women’s words only intermittent attention. So pyrotechnics of light and color must accompany women’s speech in order to beguile an attention span that wanders when women open their mouths. What women look like is considered important because what we say is not.

To sell two unreal ritual product lines—ersatz light and transient thinness—the Rites of Beauty are skillfully adapting standard cult techniques to inculcate women into them. The following scene plays on television in the United States: A charismatic leader dressed in white addresses an audience, her face aglow. Women listen transfixed: Three steps are to be undertaken in total solitude. “Give this time to yourself . . . Concentrate. Really feel it,” she says. “Follow the steps religiously.” Women testify: “I wasn’t a believer at first either. But look at me now.” “I didn’t
want to commit to it. I’d tried everything, and I just didn’t believe anything could do it for me—I’ve never known anything like it. It’s changed my life.” The camera focuses on their faces. Finally, all are wearing white and clustered around the leader, eyes shining. Cameras pan backward to the sound of a hymn. The source of the shared secret is Collagen Extract Skin Nourishment, $39.95 for a month’s supply.

These video conversions only supplement the main cult action in department stores, where 50 percent of holy oil sales are made at “points of purchase.” The scheme is pure religion carefully organized.

A woman enters a department store from the street, looking no doubt very mortal, her hair windblown, her own face visible. To reach the cosmetics counter, she must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents that combine to submit her to the “sensory overload” used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility.

On either side of her are ranks of angels—seraphim and cherubim—the “perfect” faces of the models on display. Behind them, across a liminal counter in which is arranged the magic that will permit her to cross over, lit from below, stands the guardian angel. The saleswoman is human, she knows, but “perfected” like the angels around her, from whose ranks the woman sees her own “flawed” face, reflected back and shut out. Disoriented within the man-made heaven of the store, she can’t focus on what makes both the live and pictured angels seem similarly “perfect”: that they are both lacquered in heavy paint. The lacquer bears little relation to the outer world, as the out-of-place look of a fashion shoot on a city street makes clear. But the mortal world disintegrates in her memory at the shame of feeling so out of place among all the ethereal objects. Put in the wrong, the shopper longs to cross over.

Cosmetics saleswomen are trained with techniques akin to those used by professional cult converters and hypnotists. A former Children of God member says in Willa Appel’s
Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise
that she sought out people in shopping malls “who looked lost and vulnerable.” The woman making her way down an aisle of divinities is made to look “lost
and vulnerable” in her own eyes. If she sits down and agrees to a “make-over,” she’s a subject for a cultic hard sell.

The saleswoman will move up close into the face of the shopper, ostensibly to apply the substances, but in fact generally much closer than she needs to be to do so. She keeps up a patter that focuses in on a blemish, wrinkles, the bags under the woman’s eyes. Cult converters are trained to stand very close to their potential subjects and “stare fixedly in their eyes. . . . You’d look for the weak spots in people.” The woman then hears herself convicted of the sins and errors that are putting her in jeopardy: “You use
what
on your face?” “Only twenty-three, and look at those lines.” “Well, if you’re happy with those pimples.” “You’re
destroying
the delicate skin under your eyes.” “If you don’t stop doing what you’re doing to it, in ten years your whole face will be a mass of creases.” Another cult member interviewed by Appel describes this procedure: “It was the whole thing of exuding confidence, of maintaining direct communication so forceful that you’re always in complete control. . . . You have to play up the feeling that all these people have of no sense of real security, no sense of what was going to happen in the future, and the fear of just continuing to repeat old mistakes.”