The Beauty Myth (18 page)

Many women’s alarm about age or weight—the two most developed cults in the religion—has as much to do with dismay that their minds seem so trapped in unreason as it has with “the problem” itself. The fear-of-age aspect of the Rites of Beauty uses established cult methods with a subtle hand. But the fear-of-fat aspect
actually changes the way the brain works
. Women caught in it are subjected to classic, long-established forms of thought control.

The weight mania would indeed be trivial if a woman joined the cult voluntarily, and could leave it whenever she chose. But the mentality of weight control is frightening because it draws on techniques that addict the devotee to cult thinking, and distort her sense of reality. Women who may at first choose initiation into cult thinking soon find themselves unable to stop. There are sound physical and psychological reasons for this.

The weight-control cult originated as an American phenomenon. It has spread, like other American-based cults such as Mormonism and the Unification Church, to Western Europe and the
Third World. This cult, with many others, flourished in the up-heaval and rootlessness that are the American scene.

Most cults in the United States are millenarian, revolving around a struggle between saint and sinner. Activity in the cults focuses on purifying preparations for Judgment Day. Common behaviors are trance, paranoia, hysteria, and possession.

Cults form out of the same conditions that determined women’s recent history: Active rebellion is followed by passive withdrawal. When activism is frustrated, the activists turn inward. People who follow millenarian cults are groups, writes Willa Appel, “whose expectations have undergone sudden change,” who feel “frustrated and confused.” They are attempting “to re-create reality, to establish a personal identity in situations where the old world view has lost meaning.” Millenarianism is attractive to marginal people, who “have no political voice, who lack effective organization, and who do not have at their disposal regular, institutionalized means of redress.” The cults offer “rites of passage in a society where traditional institutions seem to be failing.”

That is the story of women’s lives today. Though many have gained power over the past two decades, that power has not centered around their female bodies, as earlier women’s rites of passage had done. Women still lack organizations, institutions, and a collective voice. Any urban working woman will recite a litany of “frustration and confusion” and changed expectations. Women inhabit a cult-producing reality; all that was needed was the cult. The theology of weight control fitted the need: It shares with other successful cults three building blocks.

Cults follow an authoritarian structure
. Dieters follow “regimes” from which they must not deviate: “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth,” prays the Roman Catholic Missal, “and a door round my lips.” The tone of diet books and features is dogmatic and unequivocal. “Experts” direct the endeavor and always know best.

Cults preach “renunciation of the world.”
Dieters give up pleasure in food. They avoid eating out, restrain their social lives, and withdraw from situations in which they might face temptations. Anorexics give up most earthly pleasures—movies, trinkets, jokes—as an extension of food renunciation.

Cult members believe that they alone “are gifted with the
truth.”
Women with weight obsessions ignore compliments because they feel that they alone really know just how repulsive is the body hidden from view. Anorexics are sure they are embarked on a quest that no one else can understand by looking at them. Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.

According to Appel, cult members develop, from these three convictions, “an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual.” A high premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. “Beauty” is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden is “beautiful.” The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: “I destroyed all my fat photographs”; “It’s a new me!”

Mind-altering activities determine how much control a cult can exert over the minds of its members. There is a kind of beauty instruction that works along the same lines as the six practices Appel identifies that cults use for altering consciousness: prayer, meditation, chanting, group rituals, psychodrama, and confession.

This repetitive loop of trivial alertness is how women’s minds are altered where food is concerned. It is common knowledge that this alertness makes women
feel
slightly mad. What has not been recognized is how it
actually
makes women slightly mad. When women find we cannot stop thinking about food, we are not neurotic—we are being quite self-aware: This form of repetition, enforced on anyone who is already under pressure, actually changes the functioning of the brain. Chanters in cults exist in a “hypnagogic state.” In such a state, they are prey to aggressive or self-destructive impulses. The same trance induction takes place in the way women are instructed to think about food and fat. The same irrational feelings can terrify us. Women are led to feel that the aggression and self-destruction come from within, or are not real. But this is a genuine, formal, externally imposed implant of madness.

When a woman caught up in this kind of thinking opens her eyes in the morning, she offers up something like a prayer over the scale. Chanting is assigned in hypnotic mantras. The woman
chews food thirty-two times, she drinks ten glasses of water a day, she puts her fork down between bites. “Think of holding a dime between your buttocks . . . do this whenever possible—walking, watching TV, sitting at your desk, driving in your car, standing in a bank line.” She is urged to flex her vaginal muscles while waiting for an elevator, to clench her jaw while hanging up her laundry. The mantra of mantras is her constant calculation, throughout the day, of the calories taken in and expended. The calorie chant, a low hum, is so habitual to many women’s minds that the Hare Krishna practice of chanting seven hours a day would be child’s play to them. Like the calorie chant, a mantra is repeated on one track of the mind while the rest is busy with other activities.

The weight cult teaches meditation. There is the “one-bowl” diet, in which one sits in a quiet corner, holding a bowlful of food, and concentrates on what one wants to eat and why. Women are instructed to handle, fondle, and experience a single orange for twenty minutes. They are called to center the mind on the stomach, to make certain that “appetite” is really “hunger.” Women think about food all the time because the cult skillfully insists that they do so. If a woman is fat to the detriment of her health, it is far more likely to be as a result of the cult than in spite of it.

Group rituals are many. In aerobics classes, robotic parodies of exuberant movement give women a harmless high. The same bouncing dance is practiced by the Hare Krishnas, for the same effect. There is the ritual, described by Kim Chernin, of group bingeing and purging, which is common on university campuses, and the ritual of self-abasement when women leaf through magazines together, chanting the well-known formula: “I hate her. She’s so thin.” “You’re so thin.” “Oh, come on. Me? What are you talking about?”

Psychodrama takes place when a woman is confronted by the authority. That happens when the Weight Watchers’ group leader demeans the devotee publicly: “Come on now, tell us what you really ate.” It can be coercion from a member of one’s own family: the husband who tells the wife he is ashamed to be seen with her; the mother who buys her daughter a shirt from Bloomingdale’s for every lost pound.

Confession takes place formally in diet groups, which are highly formalized and very widespread cells of ritual. Weight Watchers has enrolled 8 million American women; each week across the United States, 12,000 classes are held, spreading and reinforcing cultlike behavior. In the Netherlands, its 200 employees offer 450 courses a year for 18,000 members at seventeen guilders weekly. It has spread worldwide, with 37 million members entering twenty-four international cells over the past twenty-five years.

The six mind-altering techniques just discussed are used by the Unification Church, est, Scientology, Lifespring, and other recognized cults. They are enacted in a context of group pressure, to effect a kind of conditioning that dismantles the individual. The weight cult draws on an inexhaustible supply of group pressure. It is better positioned than other cults, because group pressure is magnified by institutional pressure and cultural pressure. The Unification Church owns just the
Washington Times
, whereas the weight cult provides revenue to most of the women’s media.

Willa Appel explains that the need for order is physiological as well as intellectual. She describes pattern deprivation experiments and sense deprivation research to explain what happens to cult members during indoctrination. Unable to make sense of the battery of new, highly charged sensory input on the one hand, deprived of key stimuli on the other, they become disoriented, less able to pursue rational thought, susceptible to persuasion, and suggestible. They are able to welcome, then, a scenario in which “Good and Evil meet in ultimate battle.” The barrage of beauty pornography joins with recent social upheavals to constitute an entirely new, chaotic, and disorienting environment; the food self-denial most women undergo is a form of sensory deprivation. So good and evil become thin and fat, fighting for the woman’s soul.

Millenarian cults depict a dangerous, wicked outer world. The Saved, like beauties, tend to be generic, faceless. A sense of loss of control leads the faithful into purification rituals while they await the Great Day. They often need to tire themselves out: A Native American cult, the Ghost Dancers, danced themselves into collapse as they waited for the final judgment. Women’s fitness rituals are exhausting them. The postmillenarian world is a
paradise that is equally vague—“When I lose this weight . . .” “It is assumed,” writes Appel of millenarian cultists, “that merely having the power that has been so long denied will bring happiness.”

Like women subject to the Rites of Beauty, messianists “reject those parts of themselves that threaten their new identity.” Classic cults—and the Rites—“offer hope as well as a wonderful new identity.” People who are vulnerable to cults have a poor sense of identity, which needs to be reinforced by “becoming another person in as many ways as possible.” Few women have a strong sense of bodily identity, and the beauty myth urges us to see a “beautiful” mask as preferable to our own faces and bodies. Dependency and the need for approval from others are also determinants. The ideal subjects for brainwashing are people who have “no . . . organization or occupation with which they were firmly identified.” They feel sympathy for the “underdogs of the world,” for the less fortunate or exploited. The Cultural Revolution in China taught “reeducation” leaders that the best subjects for brainwashing were those with the most highly developed sense of sin and guilt, and the greatest vulnerability to self-criticism. It seems from these indicators that a subject most vulnerable to mind-altering messages is a late-twentieth-century working woman, struggling to make a place for herself in a turbulent world.

A week with the Unification Church reads like such a woman’s journal. As Appel puts it:

That is a precise echo of many women’s experience today. Once inside the weight cult, one is never alone. The politeness
people extend as a matter of course to the bodies of men does not apply to those of women: Women have little physical privacy. Each change or weight fluctuation is publicly observed, judged, and discussed.

Rigid planning in cults, as in the mind of an exercise- or food-fixated woman, does away with choice: What free time the cult member has left, he or she is too exhausted to use for thinking. Nutrition patterns are altered, lowering intellectual and emotional resistance. Like the moment of sliding into size-eight jeans, “moments of ‘heightened experience,’” writes Appel, “are the explicit rewards for all the hard work and self-sacrifice.”

A potent cult-pressure experienced by a dieter is what the Unification church calls “love bombing”: the barrage of approval from everyone around her if she “gets with the program.” Love bombing carries an implicit threat: that it will be withheld. Cults reward submissiveness with love; winning love grows harder and harder, and the behavior required to do so ever more submissive.

At a certain point inside the cult of “beauty,” dieting becomes anorexia or compulsive eating or bulimia. Reward and punishment are the fulcrum of cult life: According to Appel: “Now Satan lurks at every corner, awaits every careless moment . . . tempting the holy.” Women with eating fixations see temptation everywhere. Since women’s appetites are satanic, the cult member is in a trap from which there is no escape. “By attributing to Satan desires and thoughts that the rest of society considers natural and human,” writes Appel, “cults place members in an unending emotional and intellectual bind . . . forced to reject all ‘selfish’ feelings within [her]self . . . they inevitably intrude.” To be alive is to want to satisfy hunger, but “the constant tension of having to reject innate aspects of oneself is exhausting. The convert’s own humanness places [her] membership in the group and [her] own ‘salvation’ in jeopardy.” Says one ex-cult member, “There isn’t a level of acceptance where you can just be. . . . Everything’s Ultimate. My God, if you take a shit, it’s Ultimate. They actually tell you to sit there and meditate while you’re on the john. And you feel this tremendous guilt for not being able to be focused on the Ultimate all the time.” Women learn that food and body size are Ultimate, to be meditated upon in ways, and at times, that are as degrading.